


The Final Apprentice

by OrangeCrush4U



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Action & Romance, Angst and Humor, Character Study, Conflicted Kylo Ren, Did I mention this burn is slow?, Enemies to Lovers, Episode IX predictions, Eventual Romance, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force philosophy, Future of the Force, Minor Violence, Post-Canon, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rey finds her place in all this, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-03-31 15:19:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 26,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13977906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrangeCrush4U/pseuds/OrangeCrush4U
Summary: After the escape from Crait, the Resistance searches for allies while the First Order defends its claim to power. Kylo Ren has disappeared into the shadows of his regime, striking down enemies who would seize control in the wake of Snoke's murder. Rey, now the last living Jedi knight, begins to feel dozens of Force-sensitive children scattered across the galaxy like candles in the darkness, but one light pulses stronger than all the rest combined. Unable to escape their connection, the Jedi and the Supreme Leader begin a deadly dance with the fate of the children--and the galaxy--hanging in the balance.





	1. After the Escape

Two months after the escape from Crait, Rey was ready to admit Kylo Ren had been right about exactly one thing--she needed a teacher. She called him Kylo again now, not Ben, and only gave him that name within the confines of her own head. Everyone else in the slowly rebuilding Resistance referred to General Organa’s son as the Supreme Leader. A tactfully generic label, one that could be applied to anyone who murdered their master and seized control of the First Order. Word around the galaxy was that Kylo Ren had put bounties on the heads of everyone in the Resistance and disappeared into the shadows of his regime, letting General Hux become the figurehead to preside over executions and military deployments. Rumors of Kylo Ren came from distant planets, tales of the red cross of his lightsaber flashing in the night and crusted pools of every color blood staining the ground in the morning. The less he was seen, the more terrifying he became. No one knew where he would appear next, no one, that is, except for Rey.

It was only a few weeks after Crait, after she’d felt the essence of Luke Skywalker disappearing into the fabric of the cosmos, that Rey realized she had the power to sense other potential Jedis. They were like candles in the darkness, tiny lights flickering throughout the galaxy. After spending her entire life disconnected, in the bowels of nowhere, it was breathtaking to feel the energy of dozens of minds reaching out into the void. Breathtaking and infuriating too, because she’d quickly sensed one light pulsing brighter than all the rest combined, one mind that radiated with power even as he closed his thoughts to her. The connection persisted between them, the connection that had sparked through endless space when they pressed their hands together, that had flooded deep and swift, binding them into a singular force as they battled and defeated the Praetorian Guard. She’d thought she’d gotten through to him, that their connection had actually turned him back into Ben Solo. Apparently Rey had a lot to learn about the Force. And about men.

This was the main thought occupying her mind when General Organa strode onto the ship’s bridge, preparing them for takeoff from Naboo, where she’d been trying to muster support for the Resistance. Now they were off to the next planet, looking for more supporters. Rey didn’t keep much track, except to insure that whatever planet they were heading toward didn’t pulse with that crimson, throbbing light that she’d come to associate with Kylo Ren.

“Ah, Rey.” General Organa strode past her without slowing down. “How are your studies coming along?”

Rey jumped into the small throng of people following the General. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Rey had asked General Organa about those tiny candles. She was a Skywalker, after all. She’d used the Force to save herself from certain death and had felt Luke’s passing, just as Rey had, but General Organa had never cultivated her powers through formal training and she couldn’t feel the other potentials the way Rey could. Her connection to Luke had been familial. 

“Are you connected to anyone else?” Rey had asked at the time, before she could stop herself.

General Organa hadn’t answered, but she’d turned Rey over to a Force historian, some friend of a friend of the family who made Rey listen to every battle the Jedi had fought in the last hundred years. She’d spent endless hours, day after day, learning about the Clone Wars, memorizing Death Star schematics, and reciting the names of all the masters who’d served on the Jedi High Council and the length and dates of their terms. And after full days of mind-numbing, monotone history, Rey retreated to her quarters on whatever abandoned base or ship the Resistance was using and tried to teach herself what she actually wanted to learn. She read the ancient texts she’d taken from Ahch-To and trained with her rebuilt lightsaber, before inevitably giving up and closing her eyes to welcome those candles in the darkness. Their minds flickered with light and shadow, all of them feeling alone, unaware that someone watched over them. She reached out to each one, sending them a breath of hope, an unnamed surge of energy, trying to give each the strength to carry on for one more day and all the while wondering who could do the same for her. Who would lead her into the next days, the great unknown that was her path? 

“I’m not sure my training is...working very well.” Rey confessed to General Organa, who was examining some documents Captain Dameron handed her. The two of them were pointing at opposite planets on the map before Poe nodded and retreated to notify his pilots of their next course. 

“Professor Erso says you’re coming along well.”

“Yes, and the history is great. Really. I was just hoping to learn more about the Force itself. And about the future.”

“Aren’t we all.” Another contingent of lieutenants descended on the General and like that, their conversation was over. Just like every conversation Rey had tried to have with General Organa in the last two months. The older woman was too busy seeking resources and asylum, appealing to every ambivalent settlement in the galaxy as half-politician, half-doomsayer, and Rey understood how critical that was and how dire their situation had become after Crait. This time, though, Rey was too desperate to let her go that easily. She followed General Organa across the bridge, forcing her way between the Resistance leader and the other officers, who all fell back as though Rey was some newly discovered species that required extra precautions. Her status as the sole known Jedi in the entire galaxy had created a strange distance between her and the rest of the Resistance.

“General, I have a lot of questions that Professor Erso doesn’t seem able to answer. Like...where did Luke go? He said the Force is in everything, so why do people say ‘May the Force Be With You’? How can it not be with us if it’s everywhere?”

“Rey--”

“And how can I see them? I see all of them out there. Every candle. Every child cowering in the night.”

General Organa hadn’t looked at Rey once during the entire conversation. Instead, she stared at the map Poe had handed her. “What about Hoth? Do you see any--lights--moving toward Hoth?”

Rey paused, letting herself open to the Force, stretching her mind to the frozen planet ahead. 

“No,” she murmured after a moment. “Hoth is safe.”

“Good. Thank you, Rey. We’ll find a replacement for Professor Erso if he’s not satisfactory.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

But General Organa was surrounded again, moving off into the next strategy session, the next attempt to find allies. Rey watched her go, feeling somehow like she had none.

***

Kylo Ren could’ve sympathized. He stalked the outer perimeter of his TIE Silencer, hidden in a forest on Serenno waiting for a powerful arms dealer and rumored descendent of Count Dooku to return to his jungle palace. If the fat backwater despot ever showed up, he would become the seventeenth rival to meet Kylo’s lightsaber since he’d ascended to become the Supreme Leader. As word of Snoke’s demise spread through the galaxy, along with the false report that a barely trained scavenger girl--a worthless nobody--had assassinated Snoke right in front of the apprentice Kylo Ren, rumblings of uprising had begun. All manner of factions began to plot against Kylo Ren and General Hux, smelling weakness. Kylo wanted to stand on Snoke’s throne and scream the truth, that he, he himself had struck down his master, but he couldn’t risk Hux revolting and taking half the military with him. He needed Hux’s ignorance as much as his ambition. He needed a fathier to whip across the finish line and Hux was the perfect horse, so long as he nursed a healthy terror of his new Supreme Leader. Having Hux put on the show left Kylo free to slink into the shadows, and for all his life’s pining for attention and climbing to the top of the dark side, he was surprised at how quickly he’d cast aside the pomp and gravitated to the only existence he’d ever really known. He was a child of reflections, never seen for himself but only what he could bring to others, the royal tool he might be formed into. And now, finally, after defeating everyone who would’ve used him for their own ends, he realized the only place he found any relief was in the dead of night on a planet with no moons. 

Serenno was not that place, however. The moonlight cast a pale glow on his face as he felt a flicker of the Force touch him, and he reacted like it was her very fingers on his flesh. She checked on him at least daily, he could feel it even in sleep, and he would give his right hand to find out what she wanted if he could do it without admitting he was curious. At first her checks felt like stabs, a punch of the Force against his body as he deflected her intrusions. As the weeks went by, the shape of her energy had changed. She still didn’t want to talk. She still stood by her rejection of him, he was certain, but there was a new undertone to her monitoring. Sometimes it felt brittle. Other times it was closer to loneliness. He used all his concentration to block her out, as he did every day, but he was still mystified about why their connection seemed to have deepened after Crait. If Snoke had arranged it, and Snoke was dead, shouldn’t their minds be free of one another? Kylo almost let himself smile as the arms dealer’s ship landed outside his compound. Finally, a distraction.

The man’s bodyguards stalked off the ship, gruff and arrogant in their simpleminded brutality. He could make them drop their weapons and walk away if he wanted to, such an easy target were their minds, but watching a buffoon’s fading back had none of the satisfaction as feeling his lightsaber rip through their bodies. They barely scanned the perimeter before the arms dealer walked out and into his palace. A fatal mistake, and one Kylo had deliberately insured would happen. What no one in the entire galaxy knew, save for a select few troops in his inner ranks, was that Kylo Ren had two TIE Silencers. One was idling immediately behind him. The other, identical in every way, was flying through the Arkanis Sector while flanked by his personal troops as they demolished a suspected rebel base. The decoy Silencer had been making high profile attacks for the past two months. Following the leads of informants across the galaxy, the decoy struck and then disappeared before witnesses could do more than cower. There were bounties out too, of course, with strict orders to kill any rebels on sight. Any, except for the scavenger. She was to be brought to him. No one besides Kylo Ren would kill the murderer of Supreme Leader Snoke.

As Kylo drifted closer to the palace wall, he imagined it was Rey’s unsuspecting back leaning against the bricked tower. What would happen when he saw her again? Would he feel the same surge of affinity, as if seeing his likeness in reverse, even as he raised his lightsaber to kill her? He had no choice now. No choice, he thought, as the guard whirled around at the sound of his weapon engaging. He watched the surprise slide from the creature’s face at the same rate that his entrails spilled out of his body. One quick slash and it was over. He sighed, shut off the lightsaber, and continued along the wall, hoping for a worthier opponent to make the night somewhat bearable.


	2. Hunger

Back in her quarters, such as they were, Rey was playing a game she’d invented called Fruit Jedi, where she threw a Jogan fruit into the air and tried to see how many times she could slice it with her lightsaber before all the pieces fell. Sometimes she held it in place with the Force and peeled it first. Other times she tried to flick the chunks into her mouth as she sliced them off the core. It was the most fun she’d ever had eating dinner, but it felt a little too childish to play anywhere except in total privacy, which was why she gasped and let a slice of Jogan fruit hit her in the head as she felt someone’s presence directly behind her. She whirled around to see the black-caped back of Kylo Ren.

He was feinting and dodging, lightsaber out as he deflected invisible blaster bolts and sent them back at different angles that generated a lot of screaming. She couldn’t see the people he was fighting through this Force bond, not exactly, but she felt them through Kylo’s mind, heard their crashing bodies like echoes through his ears to her own.

Rey watched, mesmerized by his fighting technique. He moved fluidly, more graceful in battle than anywhere else, and she felt his command of the Force, almost as if he was instructing the blasters where to fire, controlling every shot until it became a deafening, bloody ballet. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t been able to defeat her; he couldn’t manipulate the Force that flowed through her. 

“Excellent.” He spoke quietly after the last blaster fired and the final scream echoed through to her. “I appreciate your assistance in dispatching your guard. I assume that’s what they were, although incompetent is a generous descriptor. You should never go union for these types of positions.”

He leaned down for a blaster, which shimmered into focus for Rey as soon as Kylo picked it up. It was a late model, shiny and full of adaptations she’d never seen. She could’ve eaten for two months on that thing in Jakku.

“The technology’s first rate, of course.” Kylo continued, apparently unaware he’d opened their bond. “But you have to invest in labor, Dook-On. That was your mistake.”

“Dook-On?” Rey repeated. She’d seen the manufacturer’s insignia on several of the wrecked ships on Jakku, all of them part of the Imperial fleet. Why was Kylo Ren killing off his own suppliers?

“Rey.”

Kylo spun around and they faced each other for the first time since Snoke’s death. Both held their lightsabers ready, but neither attacked. Their minds reached out instinctively, simultaneously seeking and defending against what the other sought. Kylo felt her isolation like a tide of cold water sucking at him, pulling him in. Rey felt the twist of his resignation and angst. Both of their pulses raced. His gaze flickered up and a look of confusion overtook his scarred face. “There’s Jogan fruit in your hair.”

Her hand jerked up, but she’d barely raised it halfway before an electric blast jolted through Kylo’s body, seizing him in blue spider webs of energy and sending him crashing to the floor where he disappeared--the connection severed.

Rey ran to the spot where he’d fallen and threw her mind open wide, searching the galaxy for his energy signature. When she found him, she stood paralyzed as his light sputtered and roiled, desperate to help and trying to talk herself out of it. He was a villain. He was the dark side, the Supreme Leader of the First Order. He deserved to die at the hands of a shady arms dealer, but a shady arms dealer deserved death, too, and it seemed like that’s exactly what Kylo Ren had been delivering when she interrupted him. Whose side was he on??

***

Kylo woke up to see Dook-On’s puffed face grinning over him as another shot of blue electricity sizzled through his body. He didn’t scream. Maybe it was because he had too much self-control, too much mastery of his own Jedi-trained reflexes, but it might’ve also been because the network of electricity clamped his jaw shut so tight his teeth wanted to bleed. Dook-On let up on the current and Kylo saw the man was holding his lightsaber in his other hand.

“Death by your own sad little weapon?” Dook-On cackled and fumbled to flip the lightsaber on. “The kyber makes them useful enough for home defense, I suppose. But no range at all. An archaic, sentimental choice. When I assume control of the galaxy, boy, it’ll be supercharged blasters all around.”

He blathered on, stroking the veiny shaft of his ego while still struggling to engage the lightsaber. Kylo used the Force to keep his fat fingers away from the button while desperately searching for a way out of this electrical net. He couldn’t move, and the blue energy field disrupted much of his control of the Force. It was all he could do to keep Dook-On busy and distracted. He wished for the first time that he brought some of his troops with him on these assassination missions, when suddenly he felt Rey’s Force reaching out. It was hesitant, questioning, and he wasted no time opening his mind again to their bond, inviting her all the way in.

***

Rey walked straight through his mind into the scene in Dook-On’s palace. In less than the second it took to process the situation, she’d engaged her lightsaber and slashed it through the air to within a thumb’s width of the arms dealer’s head. Kylo’s lightsaber crashed to the floor and Dook-On clutched his other weapon with a whimper.

“Release him.” She had no idea if she could even make physical contact with anything in this vision world, but her expression dared him to let her find out.

The crackle of electricity ceased and the blue spider webs vanished from Kylo’s body. In the next moment, his lightsaber flew into his hand and he ripped it upwards, slicing Dook-On in half from groin to skull. The pieces dropped with a thud and a hot, rancid odor stained the air.

Rey jumped back and whirled on Kylo, both hands gripping her lightsaber and forcing him to stay in his crouched position, kneeling on the floor.

Kylo glanced at the fallen bodies littering the luxurious room, the whisper thin curtains ripped to shreds, the Wookie skins lying in front of a fireplace splattered with blood. There were no witnesses here, no one to judge what came next.

Slowly, he lowered his lightsaber and shut it down, keeping his eyes fixed on Rey.

“Thank you.”

She shifted her weight from foot to foot, clearly unsure how to proceed, but not ready to disarm or lower her own weapon. “You’re welcome.”

“Although,” Kylo rose in slow motion, testing both his ability to move again and the reactions of the shaken warrior in front of him, “one could argue that it was your fault I became distracted in the first place.”

“Why are you killing mercenaries to the dark side?” Rey demanded.

Moving at the speed of an iceberg now, Kylo drew in closer than he’d dared to imagine and inhaled her scent. Her lightsaber was poised inches from his neck, casting half his face into shadow. His mouth hovered near her ear and when he spoke, his breath warmed her skin. 

“You still have fruit in your hair,” he murmured. “It’s making me hungry.”

There was only time to feel the shock of red pulsing between them before she severed the connection, yanking herself back, and left him alone in a palace of corpses.


	3. A Germ of Darkness

Rey needed a friend and the first one who came to mind was the first one she’d ever made--Finn. The morning after she saved Kylo Ren’s life, Rey stalked through the corridors of the remnants of Echo Base, which was once briefly the headquarters of the Alliance--a fact she knew thanks to the endless drilling of Professor Erso. She didn’t stop to study the Imperial ravaged walls, though, and barely glanced at the pilots and mechanics who jumped out of her way. She had bigger things on her mind than being revered as the last known Jedi.

“Finn, I think I made a huge mistake.” Rey, used to coming and going from Finn’s quarters whenever they planned defense strategies or just stayed up talking about the parents they’d never known, walked into Finn’s room and stopped dead in her tracks.

“Oh!” She stared openmouthed at the naked bodies on the bed. “Two huge mistakes.”

Finn jerked and rolled into a pool of blankets, exposing Rose, who drew up a leg and arm, covering herself. They were both sweaty, flushed, and stuttering with shock and embarrassment. Rey stood paralyzed until Finn started to lunge up off the bed, apologies brimming on his lips, and then she beat a hasty retreat out of the room and slammed the door.

Rey spent the rest of the day in the back of resource planning and budgeting meetings, desperately trying to erase the image of her best friend naked and thrusting. Finn hadn’t mentioned anything about being in a relationship with Rose. Why hadn’t he told her they were involved? The longer she sat through the droning of fuel prices and food rations, the more the images of the bodies on the bed drilled into her mind and she saw details she hadn’t picked up through her shock at the time. Finn’s hand trailing on Rose’s shoulder, cupping protectively. Rose’s blush and the ghost of a smile under her stammering. Their eyes, boring into each other a millisecond before they’d realized someone was barging in on them. There was love in that room, and not just the physical kind. There was...connection.

Finn found Rey before dinner that night, but she cut him off mid-explanation, hugging him awkwardly and telling him she was happy for them. Then they sat and ate, staring uncomfortably at opposite walls, until Finn asked why she’d come to see him that morning.

“Uh...nothing important. Just a Force thing.”

“Well, you can always talk to General Organa too, you know.”

“Right.” Rey nodded and glanced at the General across the canteen. She was surrounded by her entourage, as usual, and Rey honestly had no idea how she would feel to know Rey had saved her son’s life. Or, alternately, the monster who’d killed her son’s father. 

“She’s probably better qualified to talk to about the Force. In case I’m ever...you know...”

“Doing something where you should have your door locked?” She threw a spoon at him and he laughed.

“The doors don’t lock here. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

***

That night, Rey had more trouble than usual falling asleep. The base was freezing and she only had an oversized pilot suit and a single blanket for pajamas and bedding. She tried not to think about Finn and Rose, and the basic thermal advantages of sharing quarters with someone. Eventually, when her mind became overrun with the events of the past two days, she sat up and began meditating instead, opening herself to the Force and reaching out to look for a few lonely candles in the dark, but the black seeped further than she expected. She moved deeper and deeper into it, feeling blindly into the shadows, looking for someone to help, until her entire being fell into a place that was dangerously familiar.

“Where are we?”

She spun around--and felt a hundred versions of herself spinning around--to see a pit of seaweed opening into the Ahch-To island’s ocean floor and a myriad of Kylo Rens standing on the opposite side of the gap.

His question reverberated dozens of times, spoken by each trailing image with a different inflection or pause, but all of them gazing at all of her. If he was bothered by being fractured into a hundred selves, he didn’t show it.

“I’m not looking for you.” She retorted, and felt herself repeating it louder and louder all the way down the chain.

He cocked his head--or, some of him cocked their heads while others stepped closer to the pit, lining themselves up across from the iterations of Rey. She drew an involuntary breath when his last self drew level with hers, knowing the precise moment they aligned, like finding the exact point of balance on a scale. 

“Who are you looking for?” He asked, a chorus of quiet inquiry, and then his voice sharpened. “Skywalker?”

“Luke is beyond us now.” And then, hesitating. “He wouldn’t have killed you. He wouldn’t have destroyed...Ben.”

“And yet he did. You weren’t there. You didn’t see the murder in his eyes, you didn’t feel it boiling through his mind.” His selves stepped closer to the pit and one by one, they drew their lightsabers. Rey’s iterations acted as a single unit, drawing her own weapons and holding them at the ready. 

Then he did something completely unexpected. A single Kylo Ren stepped out of the line and all of Rey’s images turned to it, her cohesiveness startled by his disconnection. The Kylo that was out of sync with all the rest of his selves stood empty handed, defenseless, and looked from the depths of the pit up into the cracks of sky above them. The wind picked up, whipping his hair and almost obliterating the words he spoke next.

“No one’s ever hated you like that. Trust me, I’ve tried.” 

It was the exact phrase Finn had spoken to her not five hours ago, joking about his unlocked door. Had Kylo mined the words out of her head? Was he trying to distract her with a veil of friendship? She was so frustrated with the splintered energy radiating from him, his haunted mix of light and dark. She should have left him to die in Dook-On’s palace.

“I’m done with this,” she shouted. “I wasn’t looking for you tonight, or Luke Skywalker. I was searching for--”

His heads jerked, all of them at once, like he could hear the cut off thought before her voices betrayed those candles in the darkness.

“Who are they?” He breathed, and that was all it took, that flare of intrigue burning in his eyes, for her army of selves to leap over the chasm and strike.

Reys met Kylos across the depths of the island, some of them crashing into the pit and ocean below, others clashing lightsabers again and again. Rey felt her selves fracturing to meet his varying attacks, her sense of identity breaking into a thousand pieces and each of them fought to end this strange connection and what it was doing to her. One Rey and Kylo gripped each other’s wrists above their heads, lightsabers crackling as they turned in a deadly dance. One Rey slashed again and again, backing a Kylo into the cave wall and slicing pieces of rock into rubble on either side of him. Several Reys and Kylos swam against the current, dropping their weapons into the deep as they struggled to get back on land. “Monster! Murderer!” Rey shouted from somewhere. “Rebel scum,” Kylo spit back, forcing her into a corner. And still, despite all the attacks, despite the myriad ways she was trying to kill him, one Rey holstered her weapon and walked around the edge of the pit to the Kylo Ren who’d been peering at the sky. As the battles raged around them, they both dropped to their knees, facing each other on the bed of seaweed.

He reached out a gloved hand, just as he’d done after they’d defeated the Praetorian Guard, except this time she reached back. Slowly, as lightsabers crashed and their own cries and grunts enveloped them, Rey grasped his glove and removed it, then placed her bare hand in his. He stared at their joined hands and drew an unsteady breath.

“I understand it now.” She heard him, even though he barely whispered. She could feel his words in her own throat.

“The seed of light in me. The germ of darkness in you.” Their hands moved along each other’s arms, tracing up, past their shoulders, ghosting over the other’s necks. Somewhere, a drowning Kylo pushed Rey out of the water with his last breath. An attacking Rey stayed her fatal blow a sizzling inch from Kylo’s heart.

“You and I--together--have done something no one before us could. We’ve brought balance to the Force. That’s why our bond didn’t die with Snoke. That’s why we can’t kill each other.”

Rey’s hand reached Kylo’s temple and his mirrored hers. Both of them felt the energy of the other meeting their every advance. Their minds dilated, stretching open and unguarded. Rey’s suppressed fury with her parents found a home in the well of Kylo’s rage. Kylo’s shred of love and protection for his mother nestled into the buoyancy of Rey’s affection. 

Rey’s eyes shut as she read his mind. “That’s why you called me nothing. Because you thought it made you everything.”

Kylo’s eyes closed at the same time and he sucked in an angry breath. “I didn’t call you nothing. I said you came from nothing.”

“You said both. And listen to your royal blood now.” A ghost of a smile crossed her face. “For all your power, your limitless resources and the trail of bodies you’ve left in your wake, nothing in the last two months has excited you as much as this moment with a”--she paused, finding his exact turn of phrase--“a barely trained scavenger.”

She felt the tone of his energy change, the shift of his blood coursing lower, and her own body responded, drawing itself closer to that red throb of light she could sense from across the entire galaxy.

His fingers brushed the side of her cheek and her eyes shot open. They were alone in the cave, all of their selves contracted back into singular forms, kneeling together.

“Rey.” His eyes dropped to her lips and each felt a jolt of attraction coming from the other, both of them stunned by the intensity of their feelings.

Rey’s eyes raked down his body, the energy of the Force a physical caress that drew a gasp from him. He, in turn, used the Force to pull her a fraction closer and ran his thumb over her mouth. 

“This won’t turn me to the light.” He breathed, leaning in.

“It won’t turn me to the dark side either.” She clamped a hand around his neck, working her fingers through his hair.

“But it might warm you.” He took a single kiss from the Jedi, his mouth tasting hers. “For those cold Hoth nights.”

Rey froze, then jerked back to see the blaze in Kylo’s eyes and she didn’t pause to read whether it was passion or the triumph of discerning the location of the Resistance in her stupid, open mind. Before he could react, she tumbled out of their bond and back into the drafty metal quarters at Echo Base, then sprinted out of the room to sound the emergency evacuation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everyone! I'm out of town this weekend and might be delayed posting chapters, but there is a LOT more to come. lol   
> I've tried to stay faithful to the characterizations while exploring this incredible yin yang energy between Rey and Kylo. Thanks for coming along with me!!


	4. A New Plan

Kylo Ren couldn’t get the flavor of Rey out of his mouth or mind. He’d never shared a connection like what they’d given to each other in that desolate cave. All his life he’d endured people reading him, forcing their way into his mind--his mother, Luke, Snoke--each repeatedly violating him and teaching him that power meant control over others. It was why he’d been trying to control Rey since the first time he’d sensed her strength, but what happened between them had nothing to do with control. It had been surrender. 

She’d opened to him at the exact rate he’d opened to her, their arms forging a link between their temples, baring their emotions, their secrets, their innermost desires and every single one had found a mirror in the other. They gave as much as they received, and Kylo felt the surreal certainty that no one had ever been closer to another person as he’d been to his one true enemy. He’d fallen out of their connection after she severed it, reeling, gasping, aroused, and stunned. He’d lain in his bed in his ship’s quarters--the place she’d called him from--trying to will his erection down so he could summon his guard and order a squadron to Hoth. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got there; he only knew he needed to be close, to somehow find her again. She thought he’d snuck into her mind to destroy the Resistance and that was fine. It was better for her to think that than suspect the truth, because the truth was that Kylo Ren had never been more tempted by the light.

***

“Idiotic. Sand. Sloth.” Rey bit each insult out as she deflected bolt after bolt from the auto blaster.

“If I wanted to be called names, I’d go hang out with Chewie.” Finn said from the corner as he fiddled with a broken weapon.

“Not you.” Rey grunted, straining to aim the rebounded shots the way she’d seen Kylo doing it. She couldn’t get the angle right and it was all she could do to make sure she kept the bolts away from Finn’s side of the room. “Me. I’m the”--grunt--“imbecile.”

She’d told General Organa and the rest of the Resistance the basic story. She’d been meditating and was pulled into a Force vision with Kylo Ren. They’d fought and he’d used the Force to read her mind and discover their location on the planet Hoth. All of that was true. Completely true. She’d just left out the parts where they’d multiplied into a hundred versions of themselves and none of them could kill any of the other. She’d left out the moment when she’d invited Kylo into her stupid, trusting mind and moved wide-eyed into his, experiencing all his anger and pain, his amusement at toying with Hux, his satisfaction at hunting the factions rising to challenge the First Order, and his vulnerability too, because at the edge of every steaming, bloody, body-strewn scene she saw his father’s dead, disappointed eyes and even her own face lurking, teasing him from a place just out of reach. And she’d left out the part where their mind-meld had pulled them closer, closer, until she was ready to jump out of her skin and into his, how she’d watched his mouth open and felt it brush her own, giving her lower lip the briefest twist and tug. She almost hadn’t heard him slip and say the planet’s name, she’d been so focused on the compulsions storming through her body. She couldn’t tell anyone the whole truth, because they’d cast her out and where would she go then? She’d spent her entire life longing for a family, a home, and she wasn’t ready to give them up. But the more she hid from her friends, the more she felt herself sliding away into the dark.

Finn spent the rest of her training session trying to cheer her up. They’d escaped without a single casualty or loss of supplies, jumping into light speed just as the First Order squadron had appeared. 

“Maybe we even beat it out of there before Kylo Ren arrived.”

We didn’t, she almost said. She’d felt the jerk in her core, the knowledge of his arrival in the heartbeat before Poe had given the command. Her eyes had darted to General Organa, who’d looked momentarily stunned and flashed a glance back at Rey. Rey had moved quickly off the bridge just as they hit light speed and left Kylo Ren’s pulsing light behind.

In the last week as they moved from sector to sector looking for a new refuge, she’d trained nonstop, and everyone seemed to understand it was because she felt guilty for her failure. They just had no idea how much she’d really betrayed them. Even now, fighting off the auto blaster’s shots, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was like they were magnets on opposite poles. The attraction was overwhelming, and it scared her more than anything ever had. Finn and sometimes Rose helped her train, and once in a while Poe stopped by to discuss tactics, but she hadn’t seen General Organa since that glance on the bridge. The more she thought about the night with Kylo though, the more she realized she needed Leia’s advice on one crucial point. And time was of the essence.

Finn switched topics when Rey put the lightsaber down and began juggling objects with the Force. Two chairs and a weapons chest circled each other in an intricate dance in the middle of the room.

“I’d like to get Rose something. A present, you know?”

“Yes. A token.” She stopped thinking about ways to approach the General and acknowledged the change in conversation.

“So?” he pressed. “What do women like?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Food. Shelter. A certainty of tomorrow.”

“Come on, Rey. You’ve got to give me more than that. I’ve never done this before and you’re my big gun. My man on the inside.”

She smirked. “How about you be my man on the inside?” Then he shrieked as she used the Force to lift him and toss him into the mix of furniture swinging through mid-air.

“I’d stop thrashing if I were you, Finn. You might take a chair to the head.”

“Consider it an advanced lesson.” He panted and flailed for a hold on anything flying past him. “Seriously, I’ll help you when you find some superhero boyfriend. Just tell me what to do.”

Superhero. She felt cold, then hot, and--like he’d been expecting this exact opportunity--Kylo Ren’s energy reached out to touch her, waiting for her to open their bond. She hadn’t found a superhero boyfriend, she thought as she deflected Kylo’s Force and slowly brought Finn and all the furniture to rest on the floor. Her match was the supervillain. 

“Make her a meal.” Rey advised Finn with a tight smile. “She’ll love it.”

***

Food. For some reason, Kylo kept thinking about food. Rey and food. She’d never had enough, obviously, and he was suddenly obsessed with the idea of laying out a feast for her and watching her eat every last bite. Gleaming morsels of meat and tender vegetables disappearing into that intractable, pink mouth. It was enough to force him on two additional stealth missions and he killed at least a dozen more people than were strictly necessary, but somehow that only made him feel worse, not better. He was killing scum, people that would hurt Rey, creatures that should be aligned with the First Order instead of rising up against him. 

On the last trip he’d become momentarily distracted, wondering if whether he opened up the connection in battle she’d come like she had at Dook-On’s palace. He tried it, and spent so much of his energy looking for her that he missed one of the blaster bolts that ripped through his left leg. The pain and frustration roared through him, unleashing incredible power from the dark side, and he’d diced the rest of the insurgents into similarly bite-sized pieces, but none that he would feed to Rey, not even in the depths of his fury. 

Since then he’d left the connection open day and night, reaching out to her even as he held strategy meetings with Hux, who was so shortsighted it was amazing the man even saw the ends of his own fingers. Blow up cities. Build more weapons. Spray the galaxy with carnage. His major plan of the moment was a “Master Controller” battle strategy, which entailed designing the entire fleet so Hux could override the controls of any ship from his command post. The man was infantile. They didn’t need to waste resources in grasping shows of strength and technology; they needed to secure the core and build a legacy from the inside out, an architecture for lasting rule. He was starting to see his place in all this, and it was greater than even Darth Vader would have been able to imagine. For all his legendary powers, his grandfather had been a Hux, the Emporer’s fathier as they incinerated planets and chased rebels across solar systems. Kylo Ren was going to accomplish more. 

He was going to change the destiny of the galaxy and, whether she knew it yet or not, Rey would help him do it. 

***

“You have to leave.” A woman who knew the value of time, General Organa wasted none of it in pointless conversation.

Rey had finally worked up the nerve to approach her after their latest all hands meeting where the Resistance had checked in with all their allies via a secure holonet channel. Everyone had wanted to know General Organa’s next move, which as a lifelong politician she’d deftly avoided answering. Now, in a private chamber, the General hadn’t even let Rey begin talking before she’d poured them both a drink and ordered Rey off her ship.

“General--”

“Call me Leia.” The older woman instructed, handing Rey a glass of lilac colored liquid. Rey took a sip and almost spit it back into the cup.

After swallowing with some difficulty, Rey coughed and defied the order. “I’m not deserting the Resistance.”

Leia sat down in the chair across from Rey and contemplated the younger woman. “How long have you been in contact with him?”

“Since Ahch-To.” She didn’t bother lying. The General had felt the bond between Kylo and Rey the second they’d shared the same planetary space.

“And why have you hid it all this time? Do you have any idea the liability you’ve become? The number of lives you’ve jeopardized?”

“Yes, of course--”

“And yet you continued to come to briefings and fill your mind with information he could take.”

Rey slammed the glass down on the table and stood up. “I’ve kept the bond closed since Hoth. I’ve never been stronger in the Force than I am now.”

“You can’t save him, Rey. My son is gone.” Leia downed the rest of her drink and stared out the window into a sea of stars.

“I know that. I was in his mind, General. It’s impossible for him to come fully into the light, just as it’s impossible for me to cross fully into the dark.”

Battle-worn and weary, the older woman closed her eyes. “Then why are you here?”

Rey leaned forward and told her about the meditation Kylo had interrupted, how he’d glimpsed the potential Jedis in her mind, all those candles in the dark.  
“I didn’t think of it right away, I was so worried about getting us all safely off Hoth, but General--”

“Leia.” She corrected again.

“--I’m terrified he’ll find them. Look at what the First Order did to Finn, how they recruited the storm troopers as children. What if Kylo tries the same thing with the potentials?”

The two women stared at each other, the last guardians of the Force in each of their generations, with the future of the Jedis hanging in the balance between them.

“How far are you willing to go?” the General asked.

“He’s in me. I’m in him.” Rey turned to the stars General Organa had been staring at earlier. This wasn’t the path she’d dreamed of walking, the home and family she’d longed for most of her life, or the more heroic journeys she’d permitted herself to imagine since she’d been swept up in the Resistance, but those things didn’t matter now. Her question to Luke had been answered; she finally knew her place in all this. “It’s not a question of how far I’m willing to go. Whether I like it or not, this is my destiny.”

Sighing, the General picked up Rey’s cup, downed it, and began outlining the plan. Several hours later, the two women finally rose and prepared to leave. From here, their paths would diverge and Rey had no idea if she’d see the Resistance leader again. Just as she reached the door, Rey pivoted back.

“You ignored him as a child.”

“What?” The General’s mouth fell open.

“He thought he reminded you too much of Han, and that’s why you shut yourself off from him, why you read his mind instead of talking to him openly. You transferred your anger with his absent father to him, and he could never redeem himself in your eyes. That’s what he thought about in the moment before he killed Han Solo.”

Tears streamed down the General’s face and Rey struggled to keep her own in check.

“You didn’t destroy your son, Leia. He did that himself, but the monster that’s left still loves you.”

Then Rey walked out of the room, leaving the General alone with her head in her hands.


	5. The Apprentice

Kylo sat in a vat of water too large to be called a tub, too small to be a pool. His quarters at their stormtrooper training facility in the outer rim were ridiculously lavish, especially when compared to the barracks where the troops lived. The bathroom alone was bigger than his TIE Silencer and sitting in the dark cavern, soaking in the water, gave him ample space to concentrate on healing the blaster wound in his leg. He’d sunk so far into the recesses of his mind that he almost didn’t believe it when he heard Rey’s startled, “Oh!”

His eyes flew open to see her standing in the middle of the room wearing an ill-fitting pilot suit.

“Welcome.” His quiet voice echoed off the rock walls. “I was starting to think you’d never open the bond again.”

She turned in a slow circle, taking in the surroundings, before coming back to stare at him. “Why do you have it open now?”

He stood up suddenly and climbed out of the water, completely naked. She was too stunned to think about possible attacks and watched him as he walked past her to the door. “I always have it open. Excuse me.”

He grabbed a towel off a hook as he left. Eager to focus on anything besides what she’d just seen, Rey edged up to the massive tub and peered into it, but the bottom was obscured by an incandescent blue swirl of liquid. She stared at it until curiosity got the better of her and she reached a finger in, then yanked it back to her chest.

“It’s a silica compound.” He spoke from behind her. “Native to this planet. It’s able to cauterize wounds.”

“It’s freezing.”

“Not cold enough.” He murmured as she turned around.

He’d covered himself with the towel, or the pertinent areas anyway, and watched as she scanned his dripping body, eyes widening as she spotted the ugly hole in his thigh.

“What happened to you?”

Kylo retraced his steps out of the bathroom, forcing himself not to limp, to harness the pain as a source of strength rather than a weakness. Snoke had taught him that. He felt her following him this time, although she stopped short at the sight of the main chamber. A massive bed took up one wall and a dining area sat opposite, with a walkway leading out to a terrace that overlooked the outdoor sparring facilities. Three moons shone through the windows, illuminating the otherwise unlit space.

He didn’t answer her question, but toweled himself off and looked for something to wear. The usual black robes he donned for bed didn’t feel quite appropriate, but the longer he looked the more uncomfortable both of them became.

“Do you mind?”

He could feel her blush through the Force bond.

“Not at all.” He continued to peruse the wardrobe. “I’ve never had a guest in my personal chambers, so I’m unfamiliar with etiquette. I’d ask for your advice, but I doubt you know any more about it than I do.”

“You start by wearing clothes.” She bit out, stalking to the window.

At length he picked a set of clothing and put it on, facing her. “It depends on the guest, I imagine. Do you want to be seen?”

“What?” She spun around just as a knock sounded on the main door and a servant entered with a large tray of food. Kylo flicked his head toward the table, but the servant caught sight of Rey and stopped in his tracks.

“The murderer.” The man breathed, backing up a few steps toward the door.

Kylo moved to intercept, but Rey lifted a hand before he could do anything.

“You observe no one in this room with the Supreme Leader.”

The servant bobbed his head once, repeating the sentence in the first person.

“You’ll return to your post and insure no one disturbs the Supreme Leader for the rest of the night.” He turned to obey until she quickly added. “Leave the tray.”

Kylo barely suppressed a smile as the servant laid out plate after plate of food and Rey tried to appear disinterested while watching his every move. After placing a bowl of Jogan fruit in the middle of the arrangement, he gave a deep bow and hurried out of the suite.

Rey looked up and for a moment they stared at each other across the vast room. Kylo wanted to ask why she’d come, and didn’t want to know at the same time. There was time for that later. There would be time for everything once the plan was in motion.

He walked to the table, halving the distance between them, and picked up a purple-striped Jogan fruit, remembering the slice that had been stuck in her hair.  
“Can you eat through the bond?”

“I don’t know.” She crossed to him, took the fruit out of his hand, and was about to try a bite when a siren blared outside. Jumping, she turned as hundreds of storm troopers filed into the sparring fields and made their formations.

“It’s just training. Evening combat maneuvers.” He tried to turn her around but she shrugged him off and returned to the window, studying the fields.

“I can feel their energy. They’re children. Innocents.”

He stepped up beside her, shoulder to shoulder. “Listen to their minds, Rey. They’re proud of what they’re doing. They’re learning to serve the First Order and protect the galaxy, even with their lives.”

And she could hear it: their pride, their devotion. There was almost a feeling of family among the masses spread below them as they moved through their drills. She sensed friendship, purpose, even a few hints of romance lurking underneath the white armor, and she realized in that moment how important it was to every creature in the universe to belong. To be part of something, even if that thing was as evil as a fascist regime. If her parents had been drunks on a different planet, she might have ended up here. She might have been raised a storm trooper.

Just then, a shimmer of light flashed into her consciousness, so bright it seemed to emanate from within the sea of soldiers, and she felt Kylo stiffen next to her.

“Did you feel that?”

She spun to face him, looking directly up into his eyes. “That was me. I was just thinking I might have been one of those storm troopers, if my worthless parents had found themselves somewhere other than Jakku.”

Kylo didn’t know why the thought enraged him. Maybe it was simply a reflection of her anger flaring through the bond. Or maybe it was the idea that someone as powerful as Rey--and by extension as powerful as Kylo himself--could be a nameless, faceless foot soldier. For whatever the reason, he had to take a moment to calm down, to soothe the energy coming from both of them. 

He slipped a hand over hers and lifted it, bringing the Jogan fruit up between them.

“Try it. I have this fantasy about watching you eat.”

Their minds opened wider at the contact and Rey held Kylo’s gaze as she lifted the fruit and took a bite, slowly chewing and swallowing. She shook her head.

“I can’t taste it through the bond.” The disappointment was hard to mask as she glanced at the feast. “It’s dust in my mouth.”

Kylo hesitated, then took the fruit from her and dilated his mind further. When he bit into the striped flesh, she could feel the juice running down his throat, the sweet pucker of flavor on his tongue. Rey stared at his mouth and felt her chest tighten. Then, before she could do something truly regrettable, she slapped the fruit out of his hand.

“You’re evil.”

His mouth quivered and both of them felt a ridiculous compulsion to laugh. Kylo mastered the urge first and ran a sticky fingertip along her jaw, wiping the smile off her face.

“I’ll feed you someday. In person. Just tell me where and when.”

She looked nervous and swallowed, promising right as the bond severed--“I will”--so that the last word was only an echo in his mind and he wondered if she’d even said it or if it was a product of his own fevered imagination. He stared at the place where she’d disappeared before pacing out to the terrace and bracing himself against the wall, watching the play of fighting and shifting bodies. It had begun. She’d done it, just as he knew she would.

Somewhere out there, living right under his nose, Rey had shown him his first apprentice.


	6. Different in Dreams

“How did it go?”

Finn and Rose’s faces crowded into the screen of the holonet on the Millenium Falcon. Rey had landed the ship on an uninhabited moon a few hours ago and was pacing the deck while BB-8 whirled around her legs, tuning up the Falcon’s ever-faulty electrical system. 

“Fine. Not fine. I don’t know.”

“Could he tell why you were there?”

“No.” The primary mission was safe, that much Rey knew. “I didn’t let him into my head that far. But I saw something I wasn’t expecting.”

“Little Kylo?” Finn cracked, laughing at his own joke.

“Yes, but something besides that.”

“What?” Finn and Rose said in unison, but with completely different tones. Rose wanted to know what else Rey saw, while Finn’s eyes looked ready to bug out of his head. Rey answered Rose’s version and ignored her best friend’s shock.

“I sensed another potential Jedi, right in the middle of a storm trooper training facility.” She turned to Finn. “It was one of the trainees. One of them is a Force-sensitive and Kylo felt me sensing their energy.”

“Was he naked at the time?”

“Finn!” Rey wished she could Force-knock something blunt against his head, but Rose was one step ahead. She elbowed Finn in the kidney and the two women shared a quick Thanks/No Problem glance.

“I tried to distract him away from the thought, but I know he felt it as well. What if he figures out a way to locate others? What if he learns how to sense them, too?”

“Don’t panic.” Rose assured her. “The General said to tell you we’ve secured three already.”

So apparently General Organa wouldn’t speak directly to Rey, not after their last conversation. Rey didn’t blame the woman, and in all honesty the more distance they kept, the better for the mission. 

The General’s plan had been simple. Rey gave her the locations and as much information as she could sense about all the Force-sensitive children in the galaxy. A special group from the Resistance, headed by General Organa herself, was tracking them down and bringing them to a safe haven unknown even to Rey, as long as she didn’t meditate and go searching for them with her mind. She had to keep the information out of her brain because her job was very specific: monitor and distract Kylo Ren until the children were concealed. In a worst-case scenario--if he saw into her again the way he had in the cave--he might discover their mission but at least the children would still be safe.

Three secured. Only three with dozens more to go. She tried to find comfort in the three lives that had been given refuge.

“The General also said we’ll be making a big push in the next two days. We should be able to get them all, as long as the First Order doesn’t intercept.” Finn swallowed. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need you to do something else.”

***

After a full day’s search through the storm troopers, Kylo found the potential apprentice. It had taken thrice as long as it should have, because he’d expected to know--instantly, through his undeniable power with the Force--which one of them had caused the flash of light in Rey’s mind. He’d swept among their ranks, waiting for that burst of insight, only to realize after several hours of mounting frustration that it wasn’t a shout but a whisper, the faintest trail of vapor in the air. 

MX2472, cowering under the weight of the Supreme Leader’s triumphant inspection, had been removed from his squadron and brought to a private training facility in an entirely different system. The boy was ten, and there was something in his oversized mixed-species eyes that reminded Kylo too much of himself at that age. He didn’t know how to begin with the boy, not yet, so he’d left him in the keep of the Knights of Ren and told them to administer advanced combat drills. The child would be put through blaster firestorms and endless hand-to-hand fights. For a boy who’d spent his entire life with his fellow recruits, Kylo assumed the isolation would be terrifying, and the brutal training would create a spark of hatred that could be harnessed and used to show him his path to the dark side. This was the best way, Kylo kept telling himself as he tossed and turned in bed that night, but no matter what he did he couldn’t get those big, scared eyes out of his brain. Finally he resorted to reading Hux’s “Master Controller” implementation progress report in order to fall asleep. But as soon as he drifted off, she appeared.

“Where are we this time?”

Colors popped--bright yellows and brilliant blues. Waves lapped at the pristine shore in a hypnotic, overpowering cadence of sound. The sky bent and tilted as they looked up at it, each of them half-buried in powdery sand and unable to find the will to rise to a sitting position. They were on a beach, and yet they weren’t. The place shimmered around them, feeling more unreal by the second. Simultaneously, they rolled toward each other and lay on their sides in the sand.

“Strangely, you seem like the most stable thing here.” She reached out and brushed a layer of sand off his arm, and that’s when he realized neither of them were clothed. 

“I’m dreaming.” He dismissed the vision. “This isn’t a Force bond. I’m asleep.”

“I was sleeping, too.” She said, returning to her back and letting the dream sun illuminate her breasts and belly.

He mirrored her and shook his head. “You’re not really here.”

“Am so.”

His mouth twitched. “Are not.”

“Kylo,” she said, her words as dry as the sand underneath them. “If I was just a figment of your imagination, don’t you think you’d be having me do more interesting things right now?”

Another part of him twitched. Was she actually here, naked on a beach with him? A rush of vulnerability tempered his lust as he realized he had no cloak, no armor, no lightsaber. She could see right through him. The dark side reared and told him to master her, to make her submit to his power, but his dream mind resisted the impulse. Something in him yearned to prolong the cocoon of this insanity. He also wanted to know, with certainty, if it was real. He tried to think of some kind of test, but logic and dreams were two mutually exclusive things. As his mind raced--or at least crawled briskly--and the horizon bubbled and shifted around them, he felt her touch skimming the outside of his hip. Her fingers were timid and grainy with sand. She pushed back up to her side and hovered over him, watching her own hand trace up his waist and across his chest. His reaction was obvious to both of them.

“It’s different in dreams, isn’t it? You’ll never really know if it was me. I’ll never fully believe it was you. The memory might vanish the instant we wake up.”

“There’s one way to tell.” The idea broke through the haze suddenly. He cupped her shoulder and ran a finger along her collarbone, as if to chase the thought down, before flipping to his side again. She’d closed the distance between them and this time when they faced each other their bodies came into contact. Their legs bumped and breath mingled. Her breasts brushed against his chest and his erection, he immediately became aware, pressed into the hollow of her hip. He was torn between equally strong desires to pull away and to line their bodies up more perfectly, but he did neither. He stared at her and felt the tug of her widened eyes, the certainty that, just like him, all of this was entirely new to her. 

The beach around them faded and dropped away, leaving them suspended in space, lit by a thousand pulsing stars. There was no up or down anymore, no background noise, only an absolute quiet that amplified their breathing and every movement of their bodies.

He leaned in to meet her forehead with his own. “Meet me tomorrow on Endor, the Sanctuary Moon. Come in person, not through the bond.”

“It’s a trap.” She breathed, nuzzling into him, winding her limbs around his as if they’d created their own gravity and it was stronger than either of them. 

“If we both show up,” he said, “we’ll know this was real.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand the truth, that even if we are here together and this is actually happening,” her lips moved along his jaw, “none of this can be real. Not for Rey. Not for Kyl--”

He stopped her before she could say the name, kissing her with every emotion pent up inside of him and she met him with equal force. They twisted and locked together, fighting to be closer, to erase any space that separated them, and the more they moved, the more the heat built between them. It raged, unsustainable and dangerous, into a flash that rocketed them across the galaxy like a shooting star--breathtaking in its death throes--and just as Kylo felt the fire consume him he woke up gasping and alone in his bed.


	7. Defying Leia

Could someone die of mortification? In the hours since she’d awoken from the beach dream, Rey paced, obsessed, groaned, and shuddered over every inch of the Falcon while BB-8 rolled behind her, asking over and over again where they were headed next.

“Endor,” she finally said.

There was only one way to insure she had not participated in a naked, unconscious rendezvous with the Supreme Leader of the First Order and that was to go to Endor and make sure he didn’t show up. If Kylo wasn’t there, then it had only been a dream. Fantasies she could deal with. A steamy relationship with her sworn enemy, not so much.

They lifted off the moon and exited its orbit, preparing to hit light speed when suddenly someone screamed.

“What was that?” Rey leaped out of the pilot’s chair.

BB-8 beeped a shrug. Its sensors hadn’t picked up anything.

“It was right here.” She looked around, spooked. “A child.”

Then it came again, ripping through her mind and she realized what it was--one of the Force-sensitive children, her candles in the night. One of them was in danger.

“Change course, BB-8.” Rey squeezed her temples and concentrated, pulling the exact system and planet from the echo. “We’re going to the Kashyyyk system.”

BB-8 beeped again.

“No, it’s not about the children.” Rey lied. “I know General Organa has forbidden us from contacting them.”

Then she made herself especially busy adjusting controls and gauges, trying to stave off any further inquiry from the curious droid and ignore the fact that she was directly defying Resistance orders. It just seemed so wrong going to Endor to *not* meet Kylo Ren when she could be doing something important, like rescuing someone. This child’s life might be in danger and somehow the cry felt like a different child. A new child. She was almost positive she hadn’t given these coordinates to Leia during their planning. This particular light felt like...

As Rey realized where she’d sensed it before, her head snapped up and she slammed the Falcon into light speed.

***

The Sanctuary Moon. Who had he been kidding? There was no sanctuary here. Kylo had been on Endor less than twenty minutes before all his mother’s stories flooded into his memory. As a kid he’d begged her to retell the tale of defeating the Empire and on the rare occasions she actually did, he’d basked in having her undivided attention. But inevitably he asked the wrong questions. If he brought up Han Solo or pressed her with his curiosity about Darth Vader, she would get a pained look on her face and immediately shut down. Then she returned to her mission and he was alone again. The memories now were a strangled mix of hope and love for his mother, and anger at Han Solo for ruining everything as always. Han Solo was a weak man and he assumed that’s why his mother could hardly stand hearing his name. As a child, Ben had decided he wouldn’t be a weak man. He’d be strong, as strong as Darth Vader had been, and then his mother would look at him again. If he was strong enough, she’d never look away.

Kylo skulked through the forests of Endor, swatting down trees and bushes with his lightsaber. He’d been here for several hours now, with no sign of Rey’s energy getting any closer. He knew she’d been in the dream last night. It was her. He’d felt it in every molecule of his body and now she was rejecting him, just like his mother had rejected him. He swiped at the forest again and again, letting the trees fall down around him with earsplitting crashes, but even that reminded him of his first lightsaber duel with Rey. By the time a small, furry body swooped out of the canopy and fired an arrow at him, Kylo was eager for bloodshed.

He decimated the arrow with an easy swipe and used the Force to pull the creature out of the tree. When he decapitated the thing its head came off like butter, as if it was some kind of boneless oversized toy made only of stuffing and gel. Kylo almost stopped to examine the corpse, the famed Ewoks that had improbably helped destroy his grandfather’s empire. How could something so small and soft, so easily killed, have any power at all? But before he could bend over to look closer at the miniature body, dozens more arrows flew through the air.

Ten minutes and a rising pile of Ewok casualties later, he felt a weak tug at his consciousness. Rey opened the Force bond and Kylo saw her--much like the Ewok in front of him--lying covered in blood.

“Rey!”

"Kylo." She struggled to say his name and he felt the uneven sputter of her pulse.

“No! Focus, Rey.” Kylo was already deflecting the last few arrows and sprinting back to the TIE Silencer, throwing the majority of his power through the bond to help her regulate her breathing and heartbeat. “Where are you?”

“I saved him. You can’t have him. I just...wanted you to know that.”

The bond started to waver and fade. Reaching his ship, Kylo sat in the pilot’s seat and shut his eyes, focusing all his concentration on Rey. He could only see her and the ground immediately underneath her. There was nothing to indicate where in the galaxy she was. What if she died in some nameless, desolate place? What if he never even found her body?

“You’ll show me where you are.” He used his most compelling voice.

A laugh stuttered up out of her heaving chest, despite all the pain that radiated through the bond. “You can’t pull mind tricks on me, not even on my deathbed.”

He threw his lightsaber into one of the control panels and punched something that snapped a bone in his hand. He barely noticed.

“Goddamnit, Rey, do you want to live?”

Her breathing picked up as the conflict raged inside her. He powered up his ship and shot out of the moon’s atmosphere, ready to hit light speed the moment he located her. He searched with his mind, desperately, and finally found a trace of her energy. It was a flicker, so subtle he’d almost overlooked it--just like the apprentice among the storm troopers--and he contracted his mind until it was the only thing in the world.

Kashyyyk.

His eyes shot open and suddenly he knew what happened.


	8. The Battle of Kashyyyk

Even through the fire of pain in her side, Rey felt the moment her Force bond with Kylo closed. She’d wanted to tell him she’d beaten him--yes--but if she was going to be completely honest, she’d wanted to see him one last time, too. He’d find her body soon enough. She glanced around at the remains of the Knights of Ren. Half of them were in multiple pieces and only one was still alive, creeping in gasping inches across the floor toward a control station. She would’ve tried to get up and finish him off, but he would easily bleed out before he could sound an alarm.

It had been a great battle, a fight worthy of her death. She and BB-8 had landed the Falcon in the middle of the base’s helipad and watched as the knights filed out and took firing positions. Their armor was different than she’d seen before, with sleek black suits and helmets to match their master. These--she realized in an instant--must be Kylo’s famed knights, which meant he’d found the child she’d sensed at the training facility. Her resolve redoubled as BB-8 beeped in terror.

“Don’t worry.” She soothed him and explained his job. The child was the only thing that mattered. If anything happened to her, BB-8 had to get him back to the Resistance. 

Then she lowered the door and strode out of the ship, calmly counting her opponents. She paused, legs braced, and drew her lightsaber up with both hands, engaging the weapon as she felt violence and hatred seething from the minds that surrounded her.

“Hand over the child,” she ordered, and that’s when the battle erupted.

Holy Force, she should’ve trained with more simultaneous blaster shots! Rey ducked and swiveled, deflecting the array of blasts but rebounding none of them into her enemies. By mere chance, one of the bounced shots hit a ground vehicle and blew the entire thing apart. In the chaos of the explosion, she sprinted to the nearest group and began taking them out one by one. Behind her, BB-8 must have hacked his way into the weapons system of the Falcon and the ship began firing at the scattering knights.

As the body count grew, fear swelled in the remaining minds. She used the Force to sense their locations, chasing them down corridors and slicing her way through each defending guard until she found the last of them in a high-ceilinged sparring room where the child huddled inside a cage in the corner. They were skilled at hand to hand, producing swords and charging her. Rey fought with all her strength, using the Force to sense their attacks, but when three of them came at her simultaneously she couldn’t deflect them all. A sword plunged through her side, ripping a scream out of her throat, and she fell forward, somersaulted, and flipped up to gut the man whose weapon gleamed with her blood. 

Things became fractured after that. Vaguely she remembered killing off the last of the knights in the sparring room, stumbling to the child’s prison, and breaking open the door. The boy had a sword slash through his clothing and trembled when she lifted a hand to him, but he came willingly.

They’d run back to the helipad and had almost reached the Falcon when a blaster shot echoed in the air and Rey’s body was slammed into the ground. 

“Go.” She’d gasped as her vision contracted. Rolling over, she forced herself up and glimpsed one last knight aiming at her, his helmet hanging in pieces on his head as he delivered the final shot.

The attack happened in slow motion. She saw the shot coming, the burst of energy meant to kill her, and lifted her lightsaber to the exact spot to make the angle. The blast bounced off her weapon straight into the firing guard’s chest.

Falling back to the ground, she’d felt the satisfaction of the moment overwhelm her, even as the life drained from her body, and that’s when she’d reached out to Kylo. To tell him she’d won. To see him one last time.

Now--as she watched the dying man’s progress, the one who’d failed to kill her, she heard the familiar swoosh of her lightsaber engaging. She’d dropped it somewhere.

The boy appeared in her vision, holding the weapon awkwardly as he stepped over bodies, whisking his tail carefully above the carnage. He picked his way toward the dying guard and paused behind him for a second, as if contemplating the strange anatomy of humans. Then he swung the lightsaber, two-handed, down into the man’s neck. The crawling body collapsed and the head rolled sideways out of its shattered helmet, spinning briefly until it settled facing away.

The boy turned off the lightsaber and walked to Rey, crouching next to her and handing back her weapon. She attempted a smile. He peered into the holes in her tunic. “Those wounds are fatal.”

She gripped the lightsaber and tried to ignore the pain. “You’re safe now. The knights can’t hurt you anymore.”

“He still can.” The boy’s eyes filled and she felt the fear coursing through his small body.

“Listen...” She struggled to speak. “Go with the droid. You have to find the Resistance and General Organa. They can protect you.”

“No.” His expression changed as he looked past Rey. “No, they can’t. He’s here.”

Before Rey could process anything, the boy was gone. She heard running, an engine throttling down, crashes, and yelling. Everything began to go dark until Kylo’s face appeared above her.

“Ben.” She breathed and saw his expression tighten before he withdrew from her line of sight. Then a burst of agony exploded in her side. Screaming, her eyes refocused and she saw Kylo’s fist go down again, punching her wound.

“Do you feel that, Rey? Do you feel the power of the pain? Take it. Use it. It’s tremendous and it’s yours. Don’t you dare let go of that pain.” 

She wanted to hit him, to kick him, to beat him with the handle of her lightsaber until he was a bloody, formless pulp. Rage at his cruelty welled up inside her and suddenly she felt how the anger harnessed all the pain, how it halted the damage in her body and even slowed her entire system down, prolonging her life. She wrapped her rage around the lacerations and the blaster hole and began breathing function back into her organs.

“Good, Rey. That’s good.” A mouth pressed briefly against her temple, so quick it might not even have happened. “I can feel you working against it now. Hold on. I have to cauterize the wound. Get ready for another dose of fuel.”

He poured some kind of liquid over her side and she gasped at the burning sensation, but she did as he instructed and opened herself to the fire instead of instinctually blocking or trying to subdue it. She grabbed the writhing fury and wrenched its power from it, pouring it back into her body, learning how to use the dark side to sustain herself. 

It was her first lesson in immortality.


	9. Merging Forces

When Rey woke up, she was lying in a round stone room with no windows and only the howl of wind for company. She hadn’t remembered Ahch-To being this cold, but maybe repairing one’s major biological systems robbed a degree or two from one’s body temperature. Rey shifted on the bed, but no sooner had she huddled into the corner than the door opened and Kylo stood flanked by two Caretakers who shoved him aside and invaded the room. One of them began sweeping and the other tossed a coarse blanket on Rey that landed in a lump somewhere near her hip. The Caretaker said something to Kylo, who replied in a tongue Rey didn’t understand. The second Caretaker grunted and elbowed the first, who swept their way out of the room.

After they disappeared, Kylo came in. He sat on the edge of the bed and frowned at the closed door.

“Now I know why my mother insisted I learn that language.”

Rey pulled the blanket up and wrapped it around her shoulders. “They don’t like me.”

He turned to face her and almost smiled. “No, they don’t.”

Her gaze skittered away from his, unsure how to feel about anything at the moment. “Did I tell you to bring me here?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to see it. And no one will look for us here.”

Rey’s thoughts flashed to the child, but she didn’t know if he’d gotten away or not. Maybe Kylo had never seen him when he flew into the base. Keeping her mind carefully closed, she tried to sit up.

“Don’t,” he said. “You’re still fragile while your body rebuilds.” Then he glanced at her abdomen. “Would you like me to help you?”

“You already did.” She swallowed, feeling the dark side still working inside her. It was stronger than she’d imagined, like a drug, and she understood for the first time how someone could give up their entire life to chase that feeling, how--if they were weak--they might even sell a daughter for it.

“I can add my Force to yours,” he hesitated, “if you want.”

She looked up and it flashed between them, the last time their Forces had intertwined. Neither of them said a word, not about the beach, not about Endor, and the silence drew out before she swallowed and nodded.

Carefully he moved aside the fabric of her tunic to expose a giant cauterized slash into her flesh. His rage burst against the walls of their bond, flooding the room.

“Are you angry that I’m hurt or that I slaughtered the knights of Ren?”

Without answering, he laid his hands on her and closed his eyes. She could feel that swell of fury refining, taking shape under his expert manipulations until it became something else entirely--a blindingly bright energy that he slowly pushed through her skin. She felt it enter her, the magnitude of it, and she inhaled.

“Too much?” he whispered.

“No.” She covered his hands with her own and pushed them down harder, feeling the bite of pain and using it, wrapping her Force around his and opening to the darkness, to everything he could give her. “More.”

Her knee hiked up and pressed into his side. They began breathing faster. The Force expanded in her body, bringing each molecule of her being into vicious, writhing life. It wasn’t a mind connection. She couldn’t see his thoughts and somehow knew her own brain was safe, too. This wasn’t mental; it was a primal, animalistic merging. She felt him everywhere, his power filling every void and forcing her cells to reproduce, to make blood, to repair what had been broken. The effort wracked her body and her back bowed off the bed, her breath coming in short gasps now. When a guttural scream worked its way up the back of her throat, he ripped his hands away and braced them on either side of her.

Rey blinked her eyes open, immediately aware she was drenched in sweat, that her wounds had improved markedly, and that she’d never felt more depleted in her entire life. Kylo’s chest heaved with exertion as he tried to catch his breath, too. They stared at each other and she realized one of her legs was curled over his hip. A tear leaked out of the corner of his eye and her hand shook as she reached up to wipe it away.

“Thank you,” she offered at length.

He didn’t seem to hear her.

Slowly, Rey uncurled the leg from his side and rolled back to stare at the ceiling. She swallowed. 

“Have you ever done that before?”

He sat back and swiveled to face the door. “No. When I was training, Snoke took my lightsaber and stabbed me with it. Then he threw me against a wall until I realized how to use the dark side to heal myself. But he never...that was...”

Her breath had returned to normal, but she was still too exhausted to do more than turn her head toward his profile. “If there’s a baby, I’m not naming it Anakin.”

His head snapped around and their eyes locked. Hers twinkled. When his mouth quivered the slightest fraction, she wondered what Ben Solo had looked like when he laughed.

“How do you resist?” he asked and cautiously reached out to smooth a strand of her hair. “Even when you’re steeped in the dark side, it’s powerless to douse your light.”

“Did you still think you could turn me?” she asked.

He shook his head and stood up, moving to the door. Pausing with a hand on the rough wood, he spoke into the shadows. “I don’t want you to turn anymore. I couldn’t bear your death, Rey, not in any form.”

He left before she could reply.


	10. MX2472

The days that followed felt like a surreal vacation marked by some tacit agreement to remain as close as possible. If the Force bond felt strong from across the galaxy, in person it compelled them to rarely leave each other’s sight and every time Rey asked Kylo to merge his Force with hers, the bond strengthened. He couldn’t use anger as a conduit anymore. The energy wasn’t dark or light. It was something wholly different, wholly unique to the two of them and one day, the moment they sensed her body had healed completely, she moved her hands off his, slipped them under his cowl and spread her fingers over his chest, pushing her Force into him. He gasped as her essence flooded him, her generosity and her light, but it was over too soon. They broke apart when one of the Caretakers barged into the room and began scrubbing the walls.

Rey, in turn, was shocked the day she emerged from her hut to find the mixed species boy occupying the one next door. He spoke little, but immediately hugged Rey when she spotted him peeking at her from behind his door.

“What’s your name?” She asked the boy whose large blue eyes seemed to glow against the white and purple stripes of his skin. The purple, she assumed, meant he was part Keshiri, but she couldn’t place the rest of his biology.

He mumbled an answer and she had to ask him to repeat himself.

“MX2472.” 

“No, that’s completely unacceptable.” Rey brushed a hand over his cheek. “You look like a Jogan fruit to me. How about we call you Jogan?”

He took to following Rey around whenever she left her hut. Neither Kylo or Rey spoke about the child’s circumstances, but gradually both began teaching Jogan what they knew. It was an awkward process. Kylo had been taken under the wing of two masters, Rey had forced herself onto one, yet neither had learned how to dissect their knowledge and pass it on to someone else. Rey’s sessions took the guise of play. She helped Jogan float pebbles and invented a game where they tried to shoot each other’s rocks out of the air. She would have shown him Fruit Jedi if there’d been any Jogan trees on the island. Instead, she taught him how to fly the Falcon and interpret basic Droid language so he could communicate with BB-8.

After Jogan overcame his fear of the Supreme Leader, Kylo showed him how to use the Force when fighting and how to employ Jedi mind tricks on the Porgs. They tried the Caretakers first, but for a species who’d dedicated their entire lives to the ancient Jedi temple, they seemed strangely immune to the Force.

Kylo stopped thinking of the boy as his apprentice and gradually he simply became Jogan, the purple striped, gifted child who adored Rey. He wasn't nearly as powerful as either of his teachers, but he had the discipline of a soldier and the devotion of an orphan. The three of them explored the island, trekking to the highest peaks to train and meditate together. In the evenings while Jogan slept, Rey shared the sacred Jedi texts with Kylo and they read and tried to interpret them, which usually gave way to fierce debates that almost involved lightsabers on one occasion. 

Secretly they both communicated with their respective bases. Rey confirmed to Finn and Rose that she’d accomplished her mission. In their last communication before Rey rescued Jogan, which felt like a lifetime ago, Finn had passed on the order that Rey was to physically locate and distract Kylo Ren while General Organa’s team collected the remaining Force-sensitives. Their Force-bond alone wouldn’t have been sufficient, since Kylo could break it to pursue the Resistance at any time. When Rey relayed the terse confirmation that Kylo was successfully “distracted,” Finn suddenly looked constipated.

“That’s good, Rey.” Rose took over the holonet screen. “We’ve nearly got them all. Only a few of the children left to track down and then you can abort.”

“Right,” Rey said, trying not to think about Kylo’s face the last time they’d merged Forces, when she’d placed her hands on him. There was no scenario where this ended well, so the sooner it ended the better. Jogan was her only priority. He had to be. 

***

Kylo, meanwhile, spoke to his subordinates from inside his ship. He continued to order strikes and high profile flyovers of the duplicate TIE silencer, his doppelgänger in the galaxy, which allowed him to remain in self-imposed exile. When he spoke with Hux, the grasping General didn’t dare inquire where the Supreme Leader was physically located, especially since Kylo had learned Snoke's trick of laying Hux flat through the holonet transmission. Intent on staying on his feet and appearing in control in front of his troops, Hux limited their conversations to their takeover of the Inner Core. 

“We’ve met shockingly little resistance outside the occasional planet allied with the Rebels. Clearly you’ve defeated most of the rising factions, Supreme Leader. We’re in an excellent position to secure the Core, according to your plan.”

“Keep at least twenty percent of the fleet patrolling the perimeters of the Inner Rim. The Rebels aren’t in the Core.”

“They are our last, real threat Supreme Leader.” Hux gushed. “With your permission, I’ll--”

“No.” Kylo cut off the transmission. He had the key to the Rebels right here. All he had to do was enter Rey’s mind while she slept and retrieve the information. It had been done to him hundreds of times; it was the easiest thing in the galaxy and he told himself he was just waiting for the right time. 

He kept telling himself that.


	11. The Unnamed Force

“Listen to this one.” Rey said as they sat near the fire one night, poring over a few of the ancient texts.

“Eat first.” The Caretakers had roasted a giant fish over the fire and left a heaping platter of meat for the two of them before they retired to their huts. Jogan’s snores whistled out of his own hut, a noise that reverberated like mournful reeds. Kylo passed the plate to Rey and watched as she shoved a bite in her mouth, chewing with quick, unconscious movements and backhanding the oil from her lips.

She cleared her throat and glanced up from the book, taken off guard by his gaze. “What is it?”

“Have another one.” He lifted a piece of fish and she narrowed her eyes at it.

“Why?”

“I told you I had a fantasy about watching you eat. I thought it would be a banquet, a feast laid out for your sole pleasure, but somehow this is still exactly what I imagined.”

She took the fish from him, ate a bite, and then fed him the rest. They chewed and watched each other, the book forgotten on the ground.

“You’ve had feasts and banquets laid before you your whole life.”

“While you scavenged for every meal, cold, hungry, and alone. I wanted to give you the opposite. Warmth. Sustenance. Company.”

Rey glanced at the fire and the fish, grinning. “Sorry, but the Caretakers scored two out of three and they hate me.” Then she looked back at him. “I guess I’ll give you credit for company.”

When their looks became too complicated, she began to shake her head. “Kylo--”

“Eat.” He interrupted her. “Read the passage to me.”

Instead of facing what she knew they’d have to face, she turned back to the book, conscious now of how he studied her. She swallowed another bite and cleared her throat.

“The Force that can be named is not the true Force.  
The nameless Force was the beginning of the universe.  
Named, it became separated from itself.  
Named, all the creatures of the galaxy thought they understood it.  
Beware of the named Force and the illusion of opposites.  
Between yes and no, how much difference is there?  
Between good and evil, how great is the distance?  
Light and dark trick the mind.  
Instead, find the unnamed Force and give up your illusions.” 

Rey stared into the tongues of flame, licking wildly at the blackness. They argued for a while about the mysterious ‘unnamed Force’ and how it could, or couldn’t be, different than the Force they felt all around them, then moved into the rest of the passage.

“The illusion of opposites. As in there’s no such thing?” Rey got up and prowled around the fire. She preferred to pace while thinking and the habit wasn’t lost on Kylo. He smiled to himself. If Rey had any weakness now, it could be her inability to sit still.

“And the penultimate line--”

“Penultimate?” She sniffed.

“Second to la--”

“I know what it means. I was commenting on your pretension.”

“Comment on the penultimate line.” He used the Force to toss her the book. She caught it, but recited the words without glancing at the page while firelight illuminated her face.

“‘Light and dark trick the mind.’” She resumed pacing. “Not the eye, the mind. The light and dark side of the force, maybe?”

“Impossible. If the ancient masters didn’t believe in the light and dark sides of the force, the teachings would have been handed down.” He began circling in the opposite direction, the two of them ringing the fire and throwing their silhouettes on the surrounding huts. A few Porgs gathered at the edges of the shadows, drawn by the warmth yet scared of the light.

“How do you teach something that can’t be named?” Rey countered. “‘All the creatures of the galaxy thought they understood it.’ All the creatures, Kylo. Including Jedi and Sith masters. Maybe they all got it wrong. Maybe there is no such thing as a light or dark side of the Force.”

He was shaking his head long before she’d finished. “Lightsabers. The crystals are imbued with--”

“Different crystals. Different materials create the varied shades of plasma.”

Kylo paused in his circuit and grabbed another piece of fish off the tray, waiting for Rey to circle around to meet him. When she did, he slid the food between her lips.  
“Would you...please,” he studied her mouth as she chewed, “refrain from interrupting me?”

She swallowed and gave him a glistening smile. “No.”

He sighed and started walking again. “In 41 ABY, Jaden Korr recovered a lightsaber from--”

“The clone of dark Jedi Kam Solusar.” Rey finished and ate another bite of fish, trying not to laugh at Kylo’s glower. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who’d had to suffer through Professor Erso’s endless lectures.

“Korr purified the crystal of the dark side, which had previously cast a red glow.”

“And after the cleanse the lightsaber became yellow.” They circled the fire again and met on the opposite side, staring at each other. The connection tugged at their cores, pulling both a step closer.

“One crystal, two different colors.”

“Two different Jedis.”

“One using the light side and the other the dark side.”

“They used themselves. They channeled their own energy”

“into the crystals, like a filter.”

“One Force. One unnamed essence.”

“The manifestations appeared different, but”

“they’re illusions. The illusion”

“of opposites.”

Neither was entirely sure when they stopped speaking aloud, when their racing thoughts chased each other into the Force bond instead. All Rey knew was that suddenly she could feel Kylo’s mind, and the amount of need quaking there physically shocked her.

“You understand what this means.” She made herself use her voice, pushing the words into the crisp night air. “Your names are meaningless. Kylo. Ben. You don’t have to choose between dark and light. They’re both in you.” She spread her palm on his chest, then lifted his hand and placed it on hers. “They’re both in me, too. Feel it.”

He swallowed as her breast rose unsteadily under his hand. “You feel like the part of me I’ve always lacked.”

“After you told me about my parents, I wanted to kill my father, too.” She finally admitted.

Kylo took a deep breath and uttered the thought she’d already read in his mind. “I don’t want Jogan to become like me.”

Rey slid her hand up his chest and wrapped it around his neck, pulling, pulling. When his cheek touched hers, both of them closed their eyes.

“‘Give up your illusions.’” Blindly, she found his mouth and kissed it. “I have to give up the illusion that we’ll survive each other.”

“Rey, I already told you--”

She kissed him again, longer this time, and felt the lust kindling in both their minds, fanning each other, catching fire.

“Do you want to merge Forces again?” His voice shook.

“I want to merge bodies.” 

She jumped and since her brain communicated its intent a split second before she did it, his hands were ready to catch her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and wound her arms over his massive shoulders, while he gripped her bottom and back.

“Right here?” he asked.

She dilated her mind further and showed him where to take her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shameless borrowing from the Tao Te Ching in this chapter! I tweaked the text to make it more Force-recognizable, but this is basically a mashup of a few different Taoist passages for our yin yang hero and heroine. I wonder what Yoda would say...


	12. "I Know"

The ancient tree, or what was left of it, sat in the cleft between two peaks. For thousands of years it had harbored the Jedi texts, and now--as a burned out stump--it would harbor the two most powerful warriors in the galaxy. The charred trunk rose only ten feet at its highest point and all the branches had been incinerated, opening the little room to the stars above while protecting it from the wind. 

Kylo climbed the path to the tree awkwardly, unable to see where he was going with Rey wrapped around him. She explored his face and neck with her mouth, testing each spot of skin to see what reaction would flood the bond. His ears, she discovered, were particularly sensitive. When she clamped her teeth around one of his earlobes and licked, he actually stumbled into a boulder.

“Not funny,” he growled and flipped her into a princess hold so he could see the path in front of them. When they reached the tree, he stalked inside and sat her on the shelf, bracing his hands on either side of her hips.

“You have to be certain of this.” He leaned into her, touching his forehead to hers.

“I’m certain.”

“Because it won’t end here. Not for me. I’ve felt you since the day the Force awakened in you. It's like a black hole inside my body, and nothing else can satisfy it.”

With their foreheads still pressed together, Rey found the bindings of his cape and untied them. She unbuttoned the fastenings on his cowl one by one. “I’m not afraid.”

“I’ve done monstrous things. I’ll do more.”

“You won’t do them to me.”

“Rey, you don’t--”

“I do.” She used her hands and the Force to pull him by the arms, snapping his head up, and stared into his eyes. “Open your mind. See yourself in mine. You said you couldn’t bear my death, but can you bear my life?”

She opened the cowl and slid it off his body. “No one else is capable of it, not for either of us. And I don’t want to die without knowing this. Please, Kylo. Please.”

She reached for his pants, but his hands were there first and a moment later he stepped out of them, completely naked.

Skimming a hand over his chest, which was as broad, hard, and smooth as she remembered from the last time they'd merged Forces, she glanced down his body. Apparently broad, hard, and smooth described all of Kylo Ren. “So the beach was. . .accurate.”

“You admit to being on the beach then.”

He started to undress her, but her hand wrapped around him and squeezed, testing his flesh. He inhaled sharply.

“There wasn’t much time to explore, what with turning into a shooting star. Is every man this large?”

Kylo managed to untie her belt and slid her tunic into a pool of fabric at her waist. “How would I have any idea?”

“I don’t know. Storm trooper inspections. Torturing Hux.” Then it was her turn to gasp as he palmed one of her breasts and brought it with shaking fingers to his mouth.

They moved deliberately, testing each caress to feel the level of reaction coming through the bond. It was timid at first, their bodies awkward and bumping in the way of people who’d never felt someone else’s skin against their own, but gradually instinct took over. Their Force bond dilated, curling into each other’s minds and guiding them closer, showing them how they fit. When Rey kicked off her pants, Kylo stepped between her legs and joined their bodies in one blunt stroke. It was more than either of them expected. They were overwhelmed with their own sensations and the ones that flooded the bond. Kylo gripped her hips, tilting her to a better angle. Rey hooked her heels around his back, wanting every inch of him inside her. A sudden green contracted her vision and she blinked over his shoulder to see something spreading across the ground and climbing the walls of the burnt tree.

“Kylo.”

But he’d felt it too, sprouting under his hands as they squeezed her bottom.

They paused, glancing around them, and the green seemed to pause at the exact same moment.

“We’re doing this.” She looked into his eyes, inches from her own.

“Impossible.” But he heard the text in her mind. The nameless Force was the beginning of the universe. The creator of all life.

“The Force without opposites. No distinction between good and evil, between man and woman.” She began moving her hips, urging him to respond, and as he did the green started growing again. It was a spiraling, fragrant moss, neither solid nor liquid, covering the entire inside of the tree and beckoning them. Lifting Rey off the shelf, Kylo stood for a moment as her body locked around him and they kissed, a desperate, aching kiss that made everything else recede into the background. They dropped to the floor and neither noticed the Force slowing gravity down, spinning them with each stroke of their bodies above the moss which had begun to bloom with tiny silver flowers, thousands of unworldly petals opening and stretching their stamen to the black sky.

Kylo reached between them and fumbled until he found Rey’s center. He swelled when her pleasure built. She stuttered as his hips seized. They urged each other up, up, up, until neither was sure who tumbled first or broke harder; they were lost inside each other’s orgasms, and when time began again they found themselves panting in a tangle of limbs on the bed of moss, its sea of flowers already withering into shadow.

***

Later, they lay side by side, naked, staring up at the sky. Neither absorbed the view.

“Was that...normal?” Rey asked.

“Nothing between us is normal.”

“Yes, but I thought you might know. . .” She really had no idea how to finish the sentence.

“No.” He heard the rest of the question in her mind. “I have nothing to measure it against.”

Rey shifted, remembering the consuming emotions pouring through the bond. “But you’re the Supreme Leader. I assumed you could have anything--anyone--you wanted.”

Blindly, he found her and pulled her into the crook of his arm where--they both noticed--she fit perfectly. “You’ve inhabited my mind long enough to realize there’s only one person I’ve ever wanted. I’ve kidnapped, tortured, and tried to kill you, but I’ve never lied to you. I’ve never tried to disguise what I am, because we both know that would be pointless. You’ve seen into me since the moment we met.”

She could see into him. Their minds lay open, exposed, baring every secret they’d tried to keep from the other. She traced a finger over his chest. “I saw your fear of never living up to Darth Vader then. You’re not afraid of that now. Now you’re afraid of yourself, because. . .” She drew up and straddled him, feeling his body tighten deliciously. “If there is no light or dark, if there is no external battle, then you’d have to forge a new path. No more masters and apprentices. No more star wars. The galaxy as you know it would be over.”

“The galaxy as I know it already is over. Because somehow,” he slipped her down further, easing inside of her, “you love me.”

She smiled, taking him deep. “I know.”


	13. The Glowing Idol

The stars still gleamed in the night sky when Kylo woke up, disturbed by a ripple in the Force, another presence too close to where Rey slept. He reached for his lightsaber before realizing it wasn’t there; they’d left their weapons at the huts. Crouching in front of her, Kylo scanned the edges of the still-green tree, watching as it started to glow brighter and brighter. His hand moved toward Rey, ready to wake her so they could face this enemy together, when a voice intruded.

“Don’t disturb the lady.”

It came from nowhere and everywhere. The tone echoed inside of him as though someone was trying to use Force tricks on his mind.

“Show yourself.” Kylo growled, his hand still hovering over Rey’s hip.

A young man walked into the opening of the tree, tall, haughty, and glowing green. He seemed amused by the naked couple, but before he could do more than smile Kylo launched himself at him, swinging a vicious Force-powered uppercut that landed. . .nowhere.

Kylo fell through the green man, who was as insubstantial as a ghost. He hit the ground and flipped over, ready to find some other way to abolish this specter.

“Get dressed and we’ll have a talk. . .grandson.” The man, unperturbed by the attack, paced a few yards away, leaving Kylo openmouthed in surprise.

Darth Vader?

***

“What is this?”

Kylo stood a strategic distance behind his “grandfather,” who seemed to be bracing his green ghost legs against a rocky outcropping that overlooked the sea below them. He’d pulled his clothes on quickly, covering Rey with her tunic and turning away from the sublime hollows of her sleeping face in order to stalk the being who had drifted to the edge of the island. The ghost’s mind was impossible to read. It seemed to be ALL mind, the entire apparition as real yet as transparent as a thought. 

“I never came here when I was alive. I wanted to visit every planet when I was child, to be the first to see them all, but this place remained hidden from me. There are few who can penetrate its atmosphere.”

Kylo studied the form without answering. It was shorter than him, less muscular. The face was similar to his mother’s when she was young. After a long moment of absorption, he jerked and spun around, searching for the ancient tree in the dark landscape behind them.

“She’s fine.” The ghost sounded almost bored. “If I’d meant her harm, I certainly wouldn’t have needed to lure you away in order to cause it.”

“If you’re really Darth Vader, then where—”

“Tatooine.”

Kylo blinked, his next question at the ready. “Who installed your cybernetic—"

“A DD-13. You’re not even trying. Ask me something harder.”

“Why couldn’t you sense your own children? Rey can feel Force-sensitive beings across the galaxy and yet you, the most powerful Sith lord of all time, couldn’t even find your blood kin.”

Anakin turned to face Kylo, eyes flashing. “Bold censure from a man who couldn’t even sense a Padawan standing a few feet away from him.”

“The child was nobody, nothing to me.” Kylo fumed.

“Just like that skinny parasitic scavenger means nothing to you?”

Kylo’s hand flew up before the leer even formed on Anakin’s face. A metallic whisper shot through the night and within seconds his lightsaber flew out of his hut, across the island, and into his clenched grip. The red plasma phased on as Kylo lifted it to point directly at his grandfather’s face. 

“She’s stronger than you could ever dream of being. She bows to no master. She can’t be turned. She’s—"

Another lightsaber flashed in the night as Rey’s weapon flew across the hills and into Anakin’s ghostly hand. He stared at it for a second, an odd smile tugging at his mouth, before he engaged the blue blade and brought it down with a sizzling crack against Kylo’s.

“She’s using my lightsaber.” Anakin forced Kylo back a step, then two. “Just like a true scavenger.”

Kylo turned and slashed the air inches from Anakin’s head. They spun, ducked and parried, working their way up an embankment and into the inky blackness of the night. Anakin was faster, Kylo stronger. When Anakin spun an impossible flip through the air, Kylo tracked him, waiting for the apparition to land and continue the fight, but the ghost alighted on a ledge far above Kylo’s reach.

“Who has the high ground now?” Kylo heard him mutter.

“What are you doing here?” He kept his lightsaber engaged, blocking the path below like an impatient predator.

“I thought you’d want to see me. Isn’t it my smashed helmet you keep in your private chambers?”

“It's true I prayed for this moment. For years I beseeched an idol and received only the shredding of my soul in return. And now when I see idolatry for the weakness it is, now you come?”

“Don’t you still crave the power? The control? The entire galaxy is at your fingertips, Kylo Ren. You have only to take the boy to set your legacy in motion.”

Kylo’s weapon lowered a fraction as his grandfather continued to speak, and in the reflected glow of the lightsaber Anakin’s eyes began to turn red.


	14. The Secret of Ahch-To

Rey sat bolt upright on the moss bed of the tree. A distant crackling sound had pulled her out of her dreams and, seeing Kylo’s side of the moss empty, she jumped up and ran out of the tree’s hollow, almost straight into the backside of a tiny glowing creature.

Stumbling, she drew back and reached for her holster before realizing she was completely naked.

“Fierce you may be, but weapons you have not.” The creature giggled while still looking away.

“Where’s Kylo? What have you done with him?”

Heedless of her nudity, Rey raced a few paces down the path, squinting into the horizon. The noises she’d heard were from a battle, she’d bet anything on it. And Kylo was gone, just when she’d finally found him.

“Worry not about Young Solo. Learn he must. Safe he will be.”

Rey turned back to the creature with the long pointed ears. It was transparent, yet substantial, clothed in a simple tunic and holding a small, crooked walking stick. She glanced at the horizon again, then the creature, and marched into the tree to get dressed. When she returned, it had perched itself on a boulder and was now facing her direction. A modest, grammatically-challenged hallucination, apparently.

“Find what you sought, did you, in the place of the ancient texts?”

Rey narrowed her eyes. “The books aren’t here anymore.”

“No, no!” The creature cackled in agreement, swinging his glowing feet. “Made sure of that, you did. But here”—he pointed at the tree—“here lay what all Jedi and Sith have sought and never found. The great balance. Sun into shadow. Shadow into sun. Foretold by many and witnessed by none, until now.”

“Witnessed?” She merely arched an eyebrow, but it was enough to make the apparition blush.

“Witnessed by the last Sith and Jedi. If this balance can hold, no more will dark and light be at war. Freedom, the galaxy will know. Freedom to live and flourish.”

“What are you talking about?” Rey tried to grab hold of the creature, and grasped nothing but air. “Speak plainly. Tell me who you are.”

“A teacher of things past, nothing more. Not like you, young and powerful Rey. You who have the fate of the galaxy in your heart.”

A scream tore through the wind somewhere beyond the dark cliffs, and Rey whipped around, trying to find its source.

“Who is attacking him?”

“The face of his ambition.” 

Rey started running in the direction of the yell, but before she could sprint farther than ten paces, she found herself inside the chamber within one of Ahch-To’s highest peaks, on the opposite side of the island. Spinning, she saw the green creature meditating on the rock where Luke had disappeared into the Force. When she tried to leave, the doorway to the outer path vanished.

“Why are you keeping me from him?” Rey ran outside and skirted the edge of the meditation rock, looking for a way to scale the cliff.

“Understand, do you, how you came to find this place when you were looking for Skywalker?” he asked.

“BB-8 showed me a section of a navigational chart. It’s how we mapped Ahch-To.”

“Ah, but the map would be useless without a true Jedi to follow it.”

“What?” Rey stopped looking for footholds and turned to face the pointy-eared creature.

“Only Jedi may voyage here. A hidden planet, this is, submerged in the very essence of the Force.”

“But . . . ” She blinked, trying to assimilate what he was saying. “Chewbacca came with me before. And the droids.”

“Others may walk through the door, but only a Jedi can unlock it.”

“Then . . . Kylo is a Jedi?”

“Hmmm.” The creature closed his eyes, seeming to ponder the question deeply. When he opened them again, he raised a hand to the far side of the island where a spark of their bonfire still illuminated the ancient huts, and his expression hardened. “Leaving, Young Solo is. And taking the child with him.”

Rey squinted into the darkness and saw the outline of the TIE Silencer rising in the night, its stark wings lifting above the island. A trick, she thought, even as she ran through the reopened chamber door and sprinted down the rocky slope, using the Force to propel her faster, flying through the darkness. The creature had lured her away and was taunting her with illusions. Kylo wouldn’t leave her now. He wouldn’t steal Jogan after everything that happened between them. But as she raced past the ancient tree and threw herself open to their bond, she felt his mind closed to her, his throbbing red energy rejecting her Force and scraping every part of her raw.

It wasn’t until she ran into Jogan’s room and saw his empty bed, until she pivoted and walked dully through the huts and into the vacant space where the Silencer had been, that she accepted the truth.

Kylo Ren was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting chapters!! I'll get back to a regular schedule after spring break. The final showdown is coming soon and I can't wait to hear what people think of Rey and Kylo's ultimate fate.


	15. A Path Divided

Her grief dripped into him like a leaking wound. The walls of their bond were breaking down, unable to hold them apart much longer. Frankly, Kylo was amazed Rey hadn’t sensed him when he wrapped Jogan up in his bedding and contained him in the Silencer. He knew the precise moment she spotted the ship lifting off the planet, the jolt of her shock and denial, and now he could feel her roil of despair even in the Outer Rim. She was alive in him, and his black hole of need for her threatened to swallow him whole.

“She’s your weakness now.” Anakin had advised back on the island, jumping lightly down to face him. “Someone will use her against you.”

Enraged, Kylo had whipped his lightsaber through the air, slicing a clean line through the place where Anakin’s heart should have beat. “She’s not Padme. Rey can’t be manipulated. Neither of us can be used by anyone anymore.”

Anakin laughed, a loud, arrogant sound that made Kylo want to rip his vocal cords out, if he’d possessed any. How had he ever idolized this strutting boor?

“Rest assured you will be used, grandson. You might just be the greatest tool I ever forged. Strike down the Jedi scavenger and everything that holds you back. Seize the child. He is your path to the future, the first apprentice you’ll need as you secure your destiny as Supreme Leader of the galaxy.”

Anakin’s eyes smoldered like banked fire as Kylo hesitated. Hadn’t that been his original plan? He’d put a bounty on Rey’s head, one million credits to anyone in the galaxy who could bring her to face justice for Snoke’s murder. Later he’d intended to use her to locate and crush the Resistance after she’d shown him the location of the Force-sensitives, the ones he planned to have the Knights of Ren train and mold into an army more powerful than legions of storm troopers. Wasn’t that what he wanted? Order and ultimate control. A legacy for lasting rule.

“You have far more than a smashed helmet guiding you now, Kylo. What are you waiting for? A dead man’s permission?”

Anakin circled him, leaning in from behind and if he’d had breath it would have whispered along the back of Kylo’s neck. “Let the past die. Kill her if you must.”

Kylo jerked, and before Anakin could say another word he was pacing away, toward the distant light of the huts on the horizon.

He knew what he had to do.

Now, with Jogan banging dully against the door of the storage bin in the Silencer and Rey’s pain gnashing a hundred times sharper through the bond, Kylo prepared for the jump to hyperspace and opened his mind—not to the bleeding ache that pulled him backward—but to the whispers ahead, her candles in the darkness, the ones who had no idea what their future held.

***

“You’ve got to be completely insane.”

Poe Dameron glanced at Rose and Finn, looking for supporters, but both of them were still staring at the holonet screen, trying to digest what Rey had just proposed.

“Give me your coordinates.” Hands still shaking, Rey flipped the Falcon controls on and lifted the ship off Ahch-To without a glance. She refused to look down, refused to let herself think about the clear, trusting blue of Jogan’s eyes. She had to stay focused, had to make sure that Jogan—even though she’d failed him utterly—would be the final apprentice, the last casualty in Kylo Ren’s quest for power.

“Rey, are you all right?” Finn asked.

“No.” She parted with a tight jerk of her head. “No, I don’t think ‘all right’ is something I’ll ever be again.”

She’d been abandoned before and had spent almost her entire life denying it until Kylo made her face the truth. But this was so much worse. This wasn't an abandonment by her blood kin. She’d been betrayed by the man who’d become her other self.

“Look, I’m all for blowing up the First Order, but this is a crazy dangerous plan. We’ve got to alert the General,” Poe insisted.

“We can’t.” Rose, as usual, was already two steps ahead. “If Rey was able to see into Kylo Ren’s mind, it’s only a matter of hours, maybe even minutes, before he realizes his vulnerability. We have to go now. It might be our only window of opportunity.”

“Can you access the system remotely?” Rey asked.

“Not without a codebreaker.”

“We’re not going there again.”

While Finn, Rose, and Poe argued about the best way to gain access to their target, Rey left Ahch-To’s atmosphere and stared bleakly at the stars. Even with the infinite space of the galaxy stretching before her, she felt the throb of Kylo’s energy like a wall closing in from all sides. He was using an extraordinary amount of power to keep her out and shunt their ever-strengthening bond, and the effort felt like it was going to swallow them both. But before it did, she was going to destroy the First Order once and for all. 

She loved him too much not to.

***

“I hope you know what you’re doing.” Anakin watched the Falcon disappear into hyperspace above their heads. The red glow had left his eyes as soon as his grandson’s back had faded into the night. “He seemed far too easy to ‘inspire.’”

“Chosen, he is.”

“You said that about me once, too, and look what happened.”

“Your fear, I underestimated, but no longer does fear hold power. Chosen, they both are, to be greater than their selves. Now is the time.” Yoda nodded and hopped off his boulder, hobbling to Anakin’s side. 

“Time for what?”

“The fate of the galaxy will be decided.” The Jedi Master looked around the island one last time and held a hand up to the redeemed Sith. “Come. The Force carries us to the past, as it carries them to the future, and in the same spot we all shall arrive.”

“Does anyone ever know what you’re talking about?” Anakin grinned and linked hands with Yoda as the two of them faded into a green mist that lingered over the rocks before dissipating in the wind.


	16. A World Without Fate

“You should stay back.” Rey argued with Finn, who’d insisted on shadowing his friend into the watering hole on Duro. She’d landed the Falcon in a prominent spot in clear sight of the entire outpost, while the other Resistance ship remained well-concealed a safe distance away.

“Rose, Poe, and BB-8 are already in position. And you might be the biggest badass in the galaxy, but you still have a back that needs protecting.”

Rey paused outside the worn doors of the pub that were doing very little to keep the rowdy voices and music contained inside. She looked at her friend and put a hand on his cheek.

“I love you, Finn. No matter what happens after this, I will always love you.”

He blushed and pulled her in for a tight hug. “Right back at you.”

Then they walked into the building and headed straight for the bar, where a blue-skinned man with several extra tentacles eyed them suspiciously, as if he already knew no good could come from humans.

“What’ll you have?”

In a voice that carried to every corner of the suddenly quiet room, Rey announced, “I’m Rey, the last Jedi warrior and assassin of Supreme Leader Snoke.” And then, over the gasps and scramble of feet, “I’ll have a Jogan juice, if you’ve got it.”

***

It wasn’t hard to find the children, not after Rey’s unintentional training and seeing all their wavering flickers of energy in her mind. Kylo simply reached out, opening himself in a manner that felt unnatural and raw, feeling his way beyond the shudder of Jogan’s fear where he was still locked away on the Silencer, and kept scanning further and further until he’d sensed them. A congregation of candles, glowing stronger now they’d found each other. He followed their energy through hyperspace and as he arrived on the silent, remote moon, he felt the other tug, the confirmation that he’d indeed discovered their refuge—he felt the essence and mind of his mother, positioning herself between him and the dull glimmer of the children’s light.

When he landed the Silencer in front of the compound, the sky was lit only by the milky swirl of orange and blue from the planet the moon was orbiting. A mist hung over the building and surrounding hills and from within it, nothing stirred.

Kylo opened the supply bin where Jogan cowered in the corner.

“Where’s Rey?” The child held a makeshift weapon in his hands that Kylo easily dislodged with a quick tug of the Force. He caught the assortment of screws and wire, and scanned it to confirm the boy hadn’t disassembled any major system panels from the ship.

“Well constructed. I wondered why you’d become quiet.”

“Where is she?” Jogan demanded again.

The walls of the bond still held them apart, but he could feel the shadow of her mind inside him. When they laid together in the ancient tree, drifting off to sleep with the satisfied ache of muscles they’d only just awakened, their consciousness had been like that of a single creature. They’d been so fully open, resting inside the other, pausing before they both intended to rouse and merge deeper. He’d seen everything in her, including the mission she’d constructed with his mother to rescue all the Force-sensitive children and hide them from him and the First Order. Brilliant, he’d thought, as he fell asleep holding her, breathing in her sun-soaked scent.

And then the past intruded again and he’d had to yank himself back, pulling out of the bond. The past kept chasing him, clawing at him, and it had to end. It was time to break free, to bring a new order to the galaxy.

“She’s fine.” He lied to the child, even as Rey’s pain leached into his throat. She was trying to bury it, trying to rise up, and he wished to God he could let the walls between them crumble, but just as Jogan was about to question him again, a rustle in the mist caught his attention.

His mother strode out in front of the compound, blaster drawn.

“Stay here.” Kylo moved to disembark. “I’m going to find you some friends.”

A storm of emotions swamped him as he walked on to the launchpad and faced Princess Leia Organa, the woman who’d always been so much more than his mother.  
She looked older—and harder—than he remembered.

“I didn’t come here for this.”

She nodded. “All the same, you’re not going to steal them without a fight.”

“I don’t want to steal them.”

“Oh, you plan to slaughter them? Taking another page from your grandfather’s playbook.” She sighed. “I’d like to say we taught you better than that, but I don’t think it ever occurred to us to teach you not to massacre children.”

She stepped closer, and out of the corner of his eye he saw someone else moving into position, a tiny figure with oversized glasses. Maz Kanata. Of course. Who else would his mother have enlisted for help besides the Force-sensitive smuggler queen?

“I learned strategy from the best. The necessary alliances. And manipulating those alliances to further your agenda.” He withdrew his lightsaber, ready to engage it if either woman started firing.

“I don’t manipulate people. I help them fight for their freedom.”

“Han Solo never cared about fighting for freedom, not when there was money to be made. You must have played a good hand to get him to come.”

Her grip on the blaster began to slip, and even at a distance he could see her struggling for control. “I didn’t want him dead.”

“Yes, you did!” Kylo erupted. “I read it in your mind a hundred times, every time he disappointed you, every time he left us for some half-baked scheme. He was weak and you hated him for it.”

Tears shimmered in her eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. She stepped even closer, until there was barely ten feet between them, a distance his lightsaber could cross with a single lunge, but the shreds of light in him wanted nothing more than to fall at her feet and cling to her.

“I’ve loved many flawed men in my life, but none so much as you. I’m going to make this easy for you, Kylo.” She lifted the blaster and pointed it straight at his chest, and her expression filled with a strangled ocean of regret and tenderness. “Let the past die. Kill her if you have to.”

He inhaled sharply, but she continued, with a small, shattering smile. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“Mother—” Kylo began, but then a roar broke through the night and a giant figure charged at them through the mist. Blaster fire rained at them from two directions and Kylo dove behind the body of the Silencer just as Chewbacca rounded the wing. Jogan jumped out of the ship with another blaster he must have found on board, and began taking aim at their attackers.

“I told you to stay inside.” Kylo whipped the boy behind him and crouched low, assessing the situation. Howling for vengeance, the Wookie kept firing, putting dents in the Silencer until Kylo leaped into view and engaged his lightsaber, sending the blaster shots pinging into the mist on all sides.

“Chewie!” He heard his mother scream, but the blasts from Maz in the distance and Jogan behind them drowned out anything she might have said after that. Kylo ducked and deflected until he found the perfect shot and sent it flying back into the Wookie—his father's only true mate—hitting him directly between the eyes and knocking the creature back on to the launch pad, dead.

“No!” Maz sprinted into view, her tiny legs eating up the distance between them as she aimed her blaster at Kylo to take her own vengeance. Kylo stopped her with the Force, paralyzing her in mid-stride with the blaster ready to fire, but before he could do more than that, another blast and a gasp had him reeling. He turned in time to see his mother drop to the ground, and Jogan adjusting his aim for the kill shot.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Kylo tossed the boy into the night, lifting him with the Force and sending him flying into the mist. A distant thud and cry were all he registered.

He ran to Leia’s form and knelt in the rapidly spreading pool of her blood.

“I can save you.”

She smiled weakly and touched his hands, stilling them before he could remove his gloves. “Neither of us. . .could save each other.”

She stared at him, drinking him in, the sight of her beautiful, haunted child grown into a man who was trying desperately to control the sobs that began wracking his chest. She lifted a palm to his cheek and smoothed the hair that had always been unruly, a harbinger she’d chosen to ignore in the years before he’d become lost to her. Now, somehow, in the moment of her death, she’d found him again. And. . .someone else.

“Rey?” She breathed, struggling to look around, to find the woman she sensed so clearly.

Slowly, Kylo placed her hand on his chest and at once she understood.

“Oh.” The effort to find air became too much for her, even as she nodded and tears streamed down the lines of her face. “I see it now. I see…the balance. My son.”

Her heart stopped and the joy seemed to crystallize on her face, the tears glistening in her eyes as they froze on Kylo, refusing to look away even in death.

He didn’t know how much time passed. He wasn’t aware of anything until a silent ring of feet crept forward, surrounding them both. Kylo looked up into the faces of dozens of children, all of them solemn and staring at the woman who’d rescued them. Jogan slipped next to Kylo’s shoulder, completing the circle. 

Without a word, they all reached out a hand and concentrated their Force to lift the body of General Leia Organa into the sky, watching her rise until she was absorbed into the stars themselves, another beacon of light in the galaxy.

Kylo stood and brought Jogan over to the grieving figure of Maz, huddled next to the body of her beloved Wookie. He’d lost his Force grip on her the moment he’d seen his mother fall.

“The child thought he was protecting me.”

“You’ve trained your apprentice well,” the ancient woman spit through her tears.

Kylo looked at Jogan, at the boy’s too-large eyes staring back up at Kylo, waiting to be punished.

“There are no more apprentices. Take the children, Maz.” He opened a pouch and dropped a fortune’s worth of nova crystals at her feet. “Show them a world without fate.”


	17. Unmasked

It didn’t take long. Rey had barely finished her Jogan juice before she heard the whine of engines throttling into the atmosphere. Finn, who’d taken a post at the door of the pub and was staring outside, nodded a confirmation without glancing back.

“Thank you.” She handed the glass back to the wary bartender, whose clientele had shrunk in half in the ten minutes Rey had been there. “You should probably leave now.” And after a brief hesitation and a look around. “It’s a very nice, cozy little place. I hope it’ll be easy to rebuild.”

With that, she picked up her lightsaber from the bar and walked outside, into the brilliant morning suns.

The Silencer was just setting down, flanked by two TIE fighters. Another fighter swooped through the sky and sent a barrage of blasts into the pub, transforming the entire building into a fireball. Rey didn’t flinch. She set her jaw and--for the first time since leaving Ahch-To--braced her energy against the wall of their Force bond, holding the quaking barrier in place so she could do what she must. It was far more difficult than she’d imagined. They’d come together so quickly, only a few days out of the entirety of their lives, but those few days had changed everything. They’d altered the very substance of her body, and now keeping Kylo Ren out of her mind was like trying to dam an ocean. Gritting her teeth with the effort, she took a wide stance and channeled the Force, praying for the power to complete this mission.

“You can do this, Rey.” Finn murmured at her side.

“Not without you, I couldn’t.” 

“Well, I am a pretty big deal in the Resistance.”

The laugh that bubbled up redoubled her connection with everything surrounding her: the dirt at her feet, the gusts of wind in her face, and the heart that pounded next to her in her best friend’s chest. All at once she was bathed in the Force, and her hold on the lightsaber started to buzz with warmth. They could do this. She may not survive, but they could win. Together.

She and Finn waited as the storm troopers jumped out of the fighters and stood guard next to the Silencer, whose doors opened with a puff of steam. Kylo Ren, dressed in a full cape and helmet strode on to the landing strip and walked purposefully toward them.

“Now.” Finn muttered and there was a pause, an adrenaline-stuttering delay as the troopers closed the distance between them, before Poe’s ship rocketed over the horizon and blasted the fighter planes on the landing pad into garbage, leaving only the Silencer standing.

The lone TIE fighter in the air circled back and suddenly four more appeared behind it, all of them bearing down on Poe, who swerved at dizzying angles and returned fire as the sky exploded in battle.

On the ground, Finn and Rey rushed the half dozen First Order troops, firing as many blasts as they could. From her vantage point on top of the Falcon, Rose took out three guards before the troopers even realized she was there. BB-8, behind one of the burning buildings, was herding all the bystanders to safety and firing electrical pulses in the direction of the battle. By the time Rey reached Kylo Ren’s towering frame, all but one of the storm troopers had been killed. That one disarmed Finn and they moved to hand to hand, struggling in the background while Rey engaged her lightsaber and stared at the mask of Kylo Ren.

“Take it off,” she ordered.

The mask moved deliberately from side to side. No. 

“Then I’ll take it off for you.” She lifted the weapon and gripped it with both hands. “It’s time to give up illusions.”

He reached one hand out to use the Force and the other to his blaster, but he was too late. Rey leaped through the air, her heart breaking in her throat, and slashed him open from shoulder to hip.

He stumbled and fell, one hand still stretched out, as if beseeching her somehow, and she watched as the heat escaped from his body. Behind her head a blast sounded, and then screaming. She ignored all of it, reaching down to remove the mask.

The man who wore the cape of Ren was dark-skinned and meticulously groomed with dead, empty eyes. His face startled her, not because she was surprised to find Kylo Ren’s decoy, but because she realized his doppelgänger looked almost exactly like Finn.

Between yes and no, how much difference is there?  
Between good and evil, how great is the distance?

The words of the ancient Jedi texts filled her head, and with a shaking hand she disengaged her light saber, wondering how great the distance was now between herself and Kylo Ren.

 

After Poe decimated the rest of the fighters, to the cheers of Rose and Finn, they all climbed into the decoy TIE Silencer, the one Rey had discovered in Kylo’s mind in the ancient tree, when all their secrets had been bared. This was the ship he'd ordered on all the high profile missions, the one that blasted a swath through the Inner Rim while the real Supreme Leader remained in the shadows to murder challengers like Dook-On, the arms dealer. It had proved an effective trick, until now.

“Can you fly it?” Finn asked.

Poe gave him a look that silenced any further questions and began fiddling with the control panels, clearly in his happy place. 

Rey handed him a copy of the codes she’d seen in Kylo’s head. “These will get us through the shields and on to Hux’s Star Destroyer. Is there room for all of us in here?”

“We have to take the Falcon too, so we have an escape method.” Rose pointed out, already moving to disembark the ship.

“No.” Rey stopped her with a hand on her arm. “It might be our path to safety, but it could give the First Order a way out, too.”

Rey glanced between the faces of her friends and allies, the few people in the galaxy she could count on to lay down their lives for what they knew was right, and she wondered how Leia Organa did it. How had the General faced the people she was willing to sacrifice? How had she given them so much hope? Rey wished for the older woman’s wisdom, for the ability to say something inspiring. Instead, she told them the truth.

“No one’s leaving that Star Destroyer until we've blown the whole thing up.”


	18. Disrupting the Order

Armitage Hux despised weakness in all forms, but most vehemently when that weakness whined from the depths of his own mind. Absolute power meant absolute order, and he loathed nothing more than the chaos and jumbled reality that ensued when Supreme Leader Snoke—and now Supreme Leader Ren—hurled him about with the Force. They struck him, strangled him, laid him flat on the floor in front of his subordinate officers, and every time without fail a small corner of his mind began whimpering, begging for the punishment to be over. That weakness was his greatest failure, and he vowed he would never succumb to it again.

Kylo Ren oozed weakness; Hux could smell it on him. He’d been bested by the girl Rey not once, but twice, escorting her to Snoke the second time so she could massacre the Supreme Leader and his entire guard while she was at it. Then Ren had allowed the Rebels to get away at the very moment of their last gasp, all because of some idiotic Jedi grudge. 

Ren was unpredictable, childish, and devoted to a backward religion. Hux didn’t believe in the Jedi. His God was order, and anything that interfered with that order had to be eliminated.

He watched the dot on the radar screen that was Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer coming in to dock on the Star Destroyer, and permitted himself a satisfied lip curl. Ren had repeatedly dismissed his Master Controller plan, not even bothering to attend the grand unveiling ceremony of the new technology, where Hux himself had remotely assumed control of the First Order’s farthest positioned Dreadnaught, half the galaxy away. Taking the controls that day, feeling the raw power of the capital ship waiting for his every command, was an intensely erotic experience, and one that Hux had privately relived in his chambers for several nights afterward. But Ren was on a mission that day, as he had been for most of the days since he’d assumed command of the Order. What the Supreme Leader didn’t know, Hux outright smiled now, was that every ship and transporter in the entire fleet had been equipped with the Master Controller technology, even his very own, precious Silencer.

The Silencer’s dot disappeared off the radar as it entered the berth, and Hux allotted himself precisely two full minutes to fantasize about the demise of Kylo Ren, complete with tortured, little girl screams. Weak screams. He’d gotten approximately 102 seconds through the fantasy when one of his captains approached.

“General?” They were all careful not to look directly into Hux’s eyes. “We may have a problem.”

***

“I liked the black uniforms better.” Rose shrugged uncomfortably in the white storm trooper outfit, which they’d stripped from the bodies of the slain troopers.

“I don’t know, I’m appreciating these more now than I ever did before.” Finn said, staring at Rose’s perfectly outlined bottom.

“Not the time, Finn.” Rey ordered, Force knocking him into a wall with a swift jerk of her hand.

“Seriously?” He bounced off it, but the gesture did what Rey intended. Since they’d strode off the TIE Silencer, Rey had felt the attention of hundreds of minds in the Star Destroyer’s berth, all of them acutely focused on the return of their Supreme Leader. Poe, Rose, and Finn had dressed as the storm troopers, but Rey wore the uniform of Kylo Ren’s doppelgänger, taking the point position and walking stiffly on mechanically elevated shoes that she’d welded together during their journey to the Star Destroyer. She’d used Jedi mind tricks on the few troopers who’d approached to escort them off the Silencer, but when she threw Finn against the wall she felt the mass of minds turning swiftly away, returning to their work and hoping the Supreme Leader didn’t focus his next attack on them.

They took the elevator Finn indicated and Rey concentrated on finding their way to Kylo’s personal quarters. She could glimpse his memory of the rooms, but their impression was hazy, as if he clearly hadn’t put any thought into his personal comforts. She focused on Darth Vader’s mask, the most defined object in his memory, and tried to ignore the discomfort of wearing Kylo Ren’s. She had kept the barrier up between them so far, straining against the gravity of their bond, but it was becoming increasingly difficult, especially while inhabiting the very cloak of his persona.

“This is it.” She murmured when the elevator stopped on the top floor.

“I was never allowed on these levels.” Finn said. 

They left the elevator cautiously and Rey led the group to an oversized, Spartan suite.

“Are you sure this is it?” Rose asked.

Poe walked straight to a pedestal in the center of the room, where a smashed, black helmet lay bathed in yellow light. “This is it.”

Rose locked the door and they all pulled off their helmets, rushing to get to work.

***

“What, pray tell, is the problem?” Hux sized up the Captain, a recently promoted woman who’d only won her position through sheer viciousness. She’d proven to her superiors that femininity could be overcome.

“We’ve been unable to board the Supreme Leader’s TIE Silencer as you ordered, General. He’s directed several troopers to guard it against any and all incursions. With the chain of command as it is. . .”

“Enough.” Hux swung toward the vast bank of viewing windows, where several other cruisers flanked the Star Destroyer, all of them in precise alignment. “Back to your post, Captain.”

He’d wanted to insure Ren hadn’t discovered the Master Controller technology. If the Supreme Leader knew Hux’s plan to overthrow him by forcing his ship to crash—making it look like an accident in battle—Hux would be as good as dead. He’d been careful not to even think about the plot too closely in Ren's presence. Who knew what he would mine out of Hux's mind? 

But now the Supreme Leader was guarding his Silencer against his own troops. He knew. Somehow, Kylo Ren knew.

As Hux broke out in a cold sweat, the same captain approached him again.

“General—"

“I told you to get back to your post!” Hux exploded.

“We have new information, sir.” She looked flabbergasted, barely aware of Hux’s ire. “The Silencer just exited hyperspace and is coming in to dock.”

“That’s hardly new information.”

“It’s not the TIE Silencer that already landed. It’s. . .another ship. A different Silencer.”

“What?” Hux strode to the radar and stared, disbelieving, as Kylo Ren logged in his clearance codes—again—and slowed down to move toward the Star Destroyer.

“All troops on alert,” he breathed. “Where did the Supreme Leader go when he originally disembarked?”

“His private quarters, General.”

Hux's jaw tightened as he stared at the portent onscreen. “Send a squad. I’ll meet them there.”


	19. Rey's Capture

As Kylo landed on the Star Destroyer, several things happened at once. A swarm of storm troopers charged toward his ship, blasters out and ready to fire. Behind them, his decoy TIE Silencer—the one that was supposed to dock exclusively in a secret base in the Unknown Regions—sat idling in the Destroyer’s berth. And just as he began to process what that meant, a stab of pain shot through the bond and filled his entire being with a panicked rage.

Rey was bleeding.

No. He’d spent the entire journey back to the Star Destroyer with the vision of his mother’s face in his mind, the absolute peace that had settled over her when he’d lifted her hand to his heart. She’d sensed the strength of his connection to Rey, the very soul of the Jedi warrior living inside him, bringing light to his darkness, and it had filled her last living moments with the revelation of what was to come. Her wars hadn’t been in vain. And neither had his. 

But all would be lost if Rey died.

He flipped off the engines and keyed in a sequence to the controls of his ship that he’d never contemplated using before, but now barely thought twice about.

“By the order of General Hux—”

Kylo swept a hand across the approaching squadron of troops, sending them all crashing into each other and sprawling on the floor, then lifted the speaker by his throat, dangling him helplessly in the air.

“I’d like to hear that order from Hux’s own mutinous mouth.”

***

Poe, Finn, and Rey shot a barrage of blasts at the entry to Kylo Ren’s quarters, where the doorway was filled with white uniforms. The first attack had caught them by surprise as they huddled around Rose at the computer console, hitting Poe in the arm and grazing Rey’s side.

“I just healed that organ,” she growled and flipped around to face the troopers, blasting them back to the far edge of the room.

“Protect Rose!” Poe shouted, but Finn didn’t need any reminders. He planted himself in front of the frantically working woman and aimed perfectly executed shots at the First Order troops, finding the gaps in their armor and slamming body after body into the walls and floor.

“Two more minutes,” Rose yelled, but with every second that passed more storm troopers rushed into the room, overwhelming them. In the middle of the sea of white stood a lone figure dressed in black, smirking. Rey had never met him before, but the reflected memory through Kylo’s mind was strong and foul. General Armitage Hux. He, too, seemed to recognize her.

“One minute!” Rose screamed over the blasts.

Rey engaged her lightsaber and started deflecting blasts, moving through the room to advance on Hux. He waited for her, only moving to avoid a collapsing storm trooper, with a smile that never wavered.

Body after body fell at Rey’s feet. She felt their lives draining out, heard their last gasps, and every light that extinguished at her feet reminded her of the Force-sensitive children, the ones she’d failed by letting Kylo Ren into her mind. She’d never be able to slaughter enough troops to make up for it and—as if to remind her of her betrayal—the Force bond grew brighter and brighter with each step she took, surging against the wall she’d built against it. Kylo’s disdain for Hux became her disdain, she could taste it as she closed the distance between them.

“The murderer.” The corner of his colorless mouth drew up.

She didn’t bother with banter; he didn’t deserve her words. She drew her lightsaber overhead with both hands, prepared to deliver the final blow when something seized her with agonizing power.

Blue spider webs of energy encased her body, knocking her to the floor. Her muscles locked up and she could barely move her head. Her lightsaber lay several feet away, half under a storm trooper’s sprawled foot.

“What is this?” But even as she asked, she knew.

Hux pulled out a hidden weapon, the same one she’d seen in Count Dook-On’s palace a lifetime ago when she’d saved Kylo’s life.

“Handy, isn’t it?” He leaned down, his face hovering just on the other side of the blue webs. “It has a kyber core. I commissioned Dook-On to manufacture a device that would neutralize someone’s power over the Force. A very specific someone, but it works just as well on you.” His smirk dissolved into a look of pure hatred. “We have to maintain order, after all. The Jedis and the Rebels will no longer disrupt my order.”

He lifted a blaster and pointed it at her heart. Someone yelled and Rey heard a rushing of bodies, followed by a barrage of blasts, but none of them hit her. She frantically tried to move, but the energy still locked her entire body in place. The Force bond swelled in her mind and she almost gave into it but then something fell into her line of vision. 

It was Finn, eyes open and lifeless.


	20. A Rey of Darkness

No, no, no, no, nooo, NOOOO. It wasn’t possible for Finn to die. Not Finn. Bright and warm Finn with his awkward earnestness, his passion, everything solid and strong and good. Rey stared into Finn’s empty eyes as the pool of blood underneath him began spreading, moving toward where she lay paralyzed under the blue energy net. The grief exploded inside her, shredding the last bit of hope from her soul. Her light was dead.

“That took four and a half minutes longer than it should have.” Hux stepped gingerly through the piles of bodies, as if repelled by the exposure of flesh and faces that should have been hidden away inside uniforms. He leaned down when he reached Rey, holding the weapon aloft and admiring it.

“Astounding, isn’t it? I almost regret what happened to Dook-On now. He could have proved a larger asset.”

Still locked immobile, Rey couldn’t do anything except feel the tide of the swelling darkness. She wanted to kill. She needed blood, as much blood as anyone had ever spilled. Her entire being fell into shadow, consumed by the dark side, and underneath the prison of the energy net, her eyes began to glow red.

“I. Will. Destroy. You.” The promise ground out from between her locked jaw.

Hux stood back up and sneered. “I’m quaking.”

He gave an order and several guards brought Poe and Rose, both de-armed and handcuffed, nearer to Finn and Rey. Poe’s storm trooper armor was stained red, but he seemed to be standing without difficulty. Rose stared at the body of her lover, her face impassive with shock, disbelief, or some strangled combination of the two. After a moment she looked at Rey and caught sight of the glow of red in her eyes, the caged viciousness just waiting to be unleashed. Without moving more than a fraction of an inch, Rose nodded and glanced down at her own wrist. Rey followed her friend’s gaze and saw a transmitter strapped to Rose’s arm, lit with a single button.

“Building a duplicate TIE Silencer?” Hux paced and mused. “I have to admit I’m impressed. It’s more than I expected rebel scum to be capable of.”

He whirled on Poe. “Now you’re going to tell me why you created this elaborate ruse and infiltrated my ship. And it’s entirely up to you how many appendages you have left when that happens.”

“General Hux?” A black uniformed man stepped into the chambers. “We’ve received some critical system updates and there’s something you should know.”

“I am busy, Captain. Back to your post.”

Poe shifted his stance while Rose and Rey traded looks again, both of them agonizingly aware that Finn’s corpse lay between them. They had nothing left to lose. If this was the moment they died, they would die far from alone. 

“But sir—”

“I said—!” Hux screamed, but was cut off by a sweeping figure entering the chambers.

“You say a lot of things, Hux.” Kylo stood framed in the doorway. “I’ve never found anything worth listening to.”

***

Upon walking into his personal chambers, Kylo noted several things at once: twenty-three bodies lay on his floor, including the traitor; the ten surviving troopers instantly stiffened at his entrance, as though hoping to be mistaken for inanimate objects; Hux’s mind projected a greasy cloud of triumph and fear; and directly underneath the pedestal holding Darth Vader’s mask lay Rey, trapped in a blue spider web of energy like some pagan offering to the spirit of his grandfather. As if to confirm that sacrifice, her eyes were no longer the warm and generous hazel he’d last seen in the ancient tree on Ahch-To. They were as red as the taunting gaze of Anakin’s ghost. Rey’s eyes were burning.

“Explain.” Kylo swept into the room, avoiding looking at Rey again. The weapon Hux was using on her seemed to be keeping her completely immobile, but he could still feel her undiluted rage thrashing at the edges of their bond.

“Obviously I’ve captured the murderer of Supreme Leader Snoke.” Hux puffed himself up and began explaining—wrongly—the existence of the duplicate TIE fighter.

Kylo let him talk, glancing at the rebels, their discarded gear and weapons, and then the computer console which had been recently activated. When he tried to access the last activity, the computer rejected his authorization code. He smiled and shook his head. It was a plot even his mother would have been proud of, full of impossible odds and the idiocy of heroes. Rey’s courage, he mused, could fill an entire planet. Then he heard a stutter.

“What?” He swung on Hux.

“You’re…” Hux worked the word out of his mouth like he’d accidentally eaten Fathier excrement. “…smiling.”

The humor vanished from his face, but not before the other two Rebels—Poe and Rose, he found their names through Rey’s memories—had also begun gaping at him. 

“Their plan.” Kylo fixed a dismissive gaze on the pilot he’d once tortured for information about the BB unit, before he’d even known Rey was alive; his mind was the most likely to break out of the two of them. “Aren’t you even interested to know why they’ve hacked into the central system?”

“Impossible,” Hux fumed. 

“The girl will remain in my private chambers. Hold the other two for…questioning.”

Hux bristled and took two steps closer, his face turning as indignantly red as his hair.

“This is the murderer! She’s overpowered you twice already. Do you really think I’m going to leave her in your charge?”

Kylo’s hand whipped out, cutting off Hux’s air supply with the Force. The general sputtered and choked, noises that Kylo never grew tired of hearing, but then another noise intruded, a guttural, rage-fueled voice.

“Ren. 

Killed. 

Snoke.”

The entire room paused, as if none of them were able to breathe. Underneath the net, Rey forced her head to move through sheer will and some of the storm troopers took a sudden step back. Her eyes looked like infernos now and black veins popped out of her skin, crawling over her forehead and temples. The dark side was eating her alive.

Rey repeated the words through clenched teeth and then the woman rebel looked up with unshed tears in her eyes.

“It’s true. Kylo Ren murdered Supreme Leader Snoke, then he and Rey both defeated the Praetorian Guard together. It’s common knowledge in the Resistance. He framed Rey so he could seize power.”

While still choking Hux with one hand, Kylo unsheathed and engaged his lightsaber with the other.

“Adding anarchy to your ridiculous plan?” 

He raised the weapon, but before he could strike a paralyzing blast of blue energy engulfed him and sent him crashing to the floor next to Rey. They lay, side by side, caged in identical blue nets of pain.

After a moment, Hux’s face appeared above him. His eyes watered slightly from the lack of oxygen, but that didn’t stop an outraged torrent of insults from pouring out of his bloodless mouth. Traitor. Usurper. Murderer. Kylo wasn’t really listening. He finally let go of the wall he’d been bracing against ever since he left Ahch-To, the effort of which had begun to feel like trying to keep a tide from coming in.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Rey. More and more of her skin was being swallowed by shadow. There were only moments left until she was lost. Just as their bond flooded open, he gathered all his strength and hurled himself toward her, crashing their nets together, and the entire room exploded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter up next!!! Thanks for reading, everyone!


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